Installation¶

NexHash builds from source with GCC, Clang, or MinGW-w64. Argon2 and bcrypt sources are vendored under lib/ and statically linked, so the resulting binary has no runtime library dependencies beyond the system libc and pthreads.

Prerequisites¶

Linux¶

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install build-essential

# Fedora / RHEL
sudo dnf install gcc-c++ make

macOS¶

# Xcode command line tools
xcode-select --install

Windows¶

Install MSYS2, then in the MSYS2 MinGW 64-bit terminal:

pacman -S mingw-w64-x86_64-gcc make

Build¶

From the project root:

make            # build dist/nexhash
make test       # build + run roundtrip tests
make benchmark  # build + benchmark all engines at level 1
make libs       # build only the static libraries (libargon2.a, libcrypt_blowfish.a)
make clean      # remove build/ and dist/
make help       # show all targets

On Windows, replace make with mingw32-make.

The compiled binary is placed at dist/nexhash (Linux/macOS) or dist/nexhash.exe (Windows).

Build variables¶

The Makefile accepts the following overrides:

Variable	Default	Description
`CXX`	`g++` (or `clang++` on macOS)	C++ compiler
`CC`	`cc`	C compiler (used for Argon2 and bcrypt sources)
`CXX_OPT`	`-O2`	Optimization flag (use `-O3` for maximum speed)
`ARGON2_IMPL`	`ref`	Argon2 implementation: `ref` (pure C) or `opt` (SSE2)

Examples:

make CXX=clang++                         # use Clang
make ARGON2_IMPL=opt CXX_OPT=-O3         # maximum performance build
make CXX=x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ EXE=.exe # cross-compile for Windows from Linux

Verifying the build¶

After building, run the test target to confirm all engines work:

make test

Expected output includes roundtrip tests for every engine and level, plus backward-compatibility checks for the legacy engine names.

Installation to system paths¶

NexHash does not ship with an install target by design — copy the binary manually:

sudo cp dist/nexhash /usr/local/bin/
nexhash --version

Docker¶

A minimal Dockerfile for trying NexHash without a local toolchain:

FROM debian:stable-slim
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends \
    build-essential ca-certificates git \
 && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
WORKDIR /src
COPY . .
RUN make
ENTRYPOINT ["/src/dist/nexhash"]

Build and run:

docker build -t nexhash .
docker run --rm -it nexhash --list-engines