The purpose of the Ren'Py build system is to provide a single system that can build the binary components of Ren'Py and all its dependencies, in the same manner that is used to make official Ren'Py releases.

Ren'Py Build requires a computer running Ubuntu 22.04. While it can run on a desktop computer, portions of the build process must run at root, and the whole process has security implications. My recommendation is to create a virtual machine, install Ubuntu 22.04 on it, and run this procedure on that machine.

The virtual machine must be provisioned with at least 64 GB of disk space. I've compiled with 8 virtual CPUs and 16GB of RAM, though it may be possible with less than that.

Setting up Ren'Py Build requires some Linux knowledge to complete.

I recommend dedicating a user to Ren'Py Build. In this example, I name the user rb, with a home directory of /home/rb. Once that's done, you will want to modify your computer so that user can use the sudo command without a password. It's important that the username you chose does not have a space in it.

That means first manually sudo-ing to root with the sudo -s command and your user's password. Run the visudo command, and add the following line to the bottom of the file:

rb ALL = (ALL) NOPASSWD : ALL

Be sure to leave a blank line after it, then save the file with ctrl+X, and use exit to get back to the non-root user. Note that this will allow anyone who can log in as rb to become the superuser of this system.

To get ready to build, log in as the rb user, and then run the following commands to instal git and clone renpy-build:

sudo apt install git
git clone https://github.com/renpy/renpy-build

Change into the renpy-build directory, and run prepare.sh:

cd ~/renpy-build
./prepare.sh

This will globally change your system. It will install packages from Ubuntu and LLVM repositories. Please make sure you're comfortable with this change before continuing.

This will first install all the packages required to build Ren'Py, and then it will clone Ren'Py and pygame_sdl2. It will also create a python virtual environment with the tools in it. If this completes successfully, you are ready to build.

Finally, a number of files need to be downloaded from third parties. These are listed in tars/README.rst .

You'll need to be in the renpy-build directory to build. If you're not, run:

cd ~/renpy-build

From the renpy-build directory, activate the virtualenv with the command:

. tmp/virtualenv.py3/bin/activate

It should then be possible to build using the command:

./build.py

The build command can take some options:

--python <version>

The python version to build. Can be "3" or "2", defaults to 3.

--platform <name>

The platform to build for. One of linux, windows, mac, android, ios, or web.

--arch <name>

The architecture to build for. The architectures vary by platform, here is a copy of the table from build.py.

# Python 2

Platform("linux", "x86_64", "2")
Platform("linux", "i686", "2")
Platform("linux", "aarch64", "2")
Platform("linux", "armv7l", "2")

Platform("windows", "x86_64", "2")
Platform("windows", "i686", "2")

Platform("mac", "x86_64", "2")
Platform("mac", "arm64", "2")

Platform("android", "x86_64", "2")
Platform("android", "arm64_v8a", "2")
Platform("android", "armeabi_v7a", "2")

Platform("ios", "arm64", "2")
Platform("ios", "sim-x86_64", "2")
Platform("ios", "sim-arm64", "2")

Platform("web", "wasm", "2")

# Python 3

Platform("linux", "x86_64", "3")
Platform("linux", "aarch64", "3")
Platform("linux", "armv7l", "3")

Platform("windows", "x86_64", "3")

Platform("mac", "x86_64", "3")
Platform("mac", "arm64", "3")

Platform("android", "x86_64", "3")
Platform("android", "arm64_v8a", "3")
Platform("android", "armeabi_v7a", "3")

Platform("ios", "arm64", "3")
Platform("ios", "sim-x86_64", "3")
Platform("ios", "sim-arm64", "3")

Platform("web", "wasm", "3", experimental=True)

--experimental

This builds platforms marked as experimental.

A second build should be faster than the first, as it will only rebuild Ren'Py, pygame_sdl2, and other components that are likely to frequently change.

It's possible to change renpy or pygame_sdl2 to be symlinks to your own clones of those projects after the prepare step is complete. Updating renpy-build itself may require deleting the tmp/ directory and a complete rebuild, though simple changes may not require that. You may also need to run prepare.sh again.

Support for unofficial builds of Ren'Py will be limited.