1# Building Node.js with Ninja 2 3The purpose of this guide is to show how to build Node.js using [Ninja][], as 4doing so can be significantly quicker than using `make`. Please see 5[Ninja's site][Ninja] for installation instructions (Unix only). 6 7[Ninja][] is supported in the Makefile. Run `./configure --ninja` to configure 8the project to run the regular `make` commands with Ninja. 9 10For example, `make` will execute `ninja -C out/Release` internally 11to produce a compiled release binary, It will also execute 12`ln -fs out/Release/node node`, so that you can execute `./node` at 13the project's root. 14 15When running `make`, you will see output similar to the following 16if the build has succeeded: 17 18```console 19ninja: Entering directory `out/Release` 20[4/4] LINK node, POSTBUILDS 21``` 22 23The bottom line will change while building, showing the progress as 24`[finished/total]` build steps. This is useful output that `make` does not 25produce and is one of the benefits of using Ninja. Also, Ninja will likely 26compile much faster than even `make -j4` (or 27`-j<number of processor threads on your machine>`). You can still pass the 28number of processes to run for [Ninja][] using the environment variable `JOBS`. 29This will be the equivalent to the `-j` parameter in the regular `make`: 30 31```bash 32JOBS=12 make 33``` 34 35## Producing a debug build 36 37To create a debug build rather than a release build: 38 39```bash 40./configure --ninja --debug && make 41``` 42 43[Ninja]: https://ninja-build.org/ 44