Here we will set up Bitcoin's first implementation also known as Bitcoin Core or the Satoshi Client. This is the reference implementations of the bitcoin system. It should mostly be used as a reference, application developers to check for BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposals) for production softwares. i.e BIP-39 for wallet softwares.
Download(as a zip file) or clone bitcoin source code from github. Here I am going to clone it:
$ git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
Change to the bitcoin directory.
$ cd bitcoin
Check the releases.
$ git tag
Select last stable release(latest release without prefix rc). Version v24.0.1 as of the time I'm writing Ones with prefix rc are for testing purporses.
$ git checkout v24.0.1
This should set the head of the branch to this release. To affirm this, you can confirm via...
$ git status
You can check the general review of the documentation of the bitcoin core system as shown.
$ more README.md
Review documentation for compiling bitcoind commandline client.
$ more doc/build-unix.md
Go through installation prerequisites, then start building process via generating build scripts as shown below.
$ ./autogen.sh
We can check the configuration options with command.
$ ./configure --help
We can then configure using the configurations above. Some simple configurations to start with.
$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME
$ ./configure --disable-wallet
$ ./configure --with-incomplete-bdb
$ ./configure --with-gui=no
We are now set to compile bitcoind.
$ make
Takes some time. If done, Bitcoin core is now compiled. We can now install various executables in our system next using,
$ sudo make install
$ bitcoind