nativelink

enter the shipstorm

What's NativeLink?

NativeLink is an efficient, high-performance build cache and remote execution system that accelerates software compilation and testing while reducing infrastructure costs. It optimizes build processes for projects of all sizes by intelligently caching build artifacts and distributing tasks across multiple machines.

NativeLink is trusted in production environments to reduce costs and developer iteration times--handling over billions of requests per month for its customers, including large corporations such as Samsung.

🔑 Key Features

1. Advanced Build Cache:

   • Stores and reuses results of previous build steps for unchanged components
   • Significantly reduces build times, especially for incremental changes

2. Efficient Remote Execution:

   • Distributes build and test tasks across a network of machines
   • Parallelizes workloads for faster completion
   • Utilizes remote resources to offload computational burden from local machines
   • Ensures consistency with a uniform, controlled build environment

NativeLink seamlessly integrates with build tools that use the Remote Execution protocol, such as Bazel, Buck2, Goma, and Siso. CMake projects work too via recc. See Build CMake projects with NativeLink. It supports Unix-based operating systems and Windows, ensuring broad compatibility across different development environments.

🚀 Quickstart

To start, you can deploy NativeLink as a Docker image (as shown below). The setups below are production-grade installations. See the contribution docs for instructions on how to build from source with Bazel, Cargo, and Nix.

You can find a few example deployments in the Docs.

📦 Prebuilt images

Fast to spin up, but currently limited to x86_64 systems. See the container registry for all image tags and the contribution docs for how to build the images yourself.

Linux x86_64

curl -O \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TraceMachina/nativelink/v1.4.0/nativelink-config/examples/basic_cas.json5

# See https://github.com/TraceMachina/nativelink/pkgs/container/nativelink
# to find the latest tag
docker run \
    -v $(pwd)/basic_cas.json5:/config \
    -p 50051:50051 \
    ghcr.io/tracemachina/nativelink:v1.4.0 \
    config

Windows x86_64

# Download the configuration file
Invoke-WebRequest `
    -Uri "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TraceMachina/nativelink/v1.4.0/nativelink-config/examples/basic_cas.json5" `
    -OutFile "basic_cas.json5"

# Run the Docker container
# Note: Adjust the path if the script is not run from the directory containing basic_cas.json
docker run `
    -v ${PWD}/basic_cas.json5:/config `
    -p 50051:50051 `
    ghcr.io/tracemachina/nativelink:v1.4.0 `
    config

❄️ Raw executable with Nix

Slower, since it's built from source, but more flexible and supports MacOS. Doesn't support native Windows, but works in WSL2.

Make sure your Nix version is recent and supports flakes. For instance, install it via the next-gen nix installer.

Caution

Executables built for MacOS are dynamically linked against libraries from Nix and won't work on systems that don't have these libraries present.

Tip

Common setup gotchas for Nix on macOS / Linux:

• Active shell environment: If the installer finishes but your shell doesn't recognize nix commands, you need to either restart your terminal session or source the daemon profile manually:

  . /nix/var/nix/profiles/default/etc/profile.d/nix-daemon.sh

• Enabling experimental features: If you used the standard Nix installer and get an error saying experimental Nix feature 'nix-command' is disabled, enable them by creating or editing ~/.config/nix/nix.conf:

  experimental-features = nix-command flakes
  

• Disk Space: Unpacking and building compilers and dependencies requires significant storage. Make sure you have at least 15–20 GB of free space on your system volume before running setup commands.

Linux, MacOS, WSL2

curl -O \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TraceMachina/nativelink/main/nativelink-config/examples/basic_cas.json5

nix run github:TraceMachina/nativelink ./basic_cas.json5

See the contribution docs for further information.

🤝 Contributing

Visit our Contributing guide to learn how to contribute to NativeLink. We welcome contributions from developers of all skill levels and backgrounds!

📊 Stats

📜 License

Copyright 2020–2025 Trace Machina, Inc.

Licensed under the Functional Source License, Version 1.1, Apache 2.0 Future License. SPDX identifier: FSL-1.1-Apache-2.0.

After the second anniversary of the date this version was made available, you may use this software under the Apache License, Version 2.0.