To build the static binary 64-bit distribution package, run:

cd /path/to/netdata.git
./packaging/makeself/build-x86_64-static.sh

The program will:

1. setup a new docker container with Alpine Linux
2. install the required alpine packages (the build environment, needed libraries, etc)
3. download and compile third party apps that are packaged with Netdata (bash, curl, etc)
4. compile Netdata

Once finished, a file named netdata-vX.X.X-gGITHASH-x86_64-DATE-TIME.run will be created in the current directory. This is the Netdata binary package that can be run to install Netdata on any other computer.

To build Netdata binaries with debugging / tracing information in them, use:

cd /path/to/netdata.git
./packaging/makeself/build-x86_64-static.sh debug

These binaries are not optimized (they are a bit slower), they have certain features disables (like log flood protection), other features enables (like debug flags) and are not stripped (the binary files are bigger, since they now include source code tracing information).

Once you have installed a binary package with debugging info, you will need to install valgrind and run this command to start Netdata:

PATH="/opt/netdata/bin:${PATH}" valgrind --undef-value-errors=no /opt/netdata/bin/srv/netdata -D

The above command, will run Netdata under valgrind. While Netdata runs under valgrind it will be 10x slower and use a lot more memory.

If Netdata crashes, valgrind will print a stack trace of the issue. Open a github issue to let us know.

To stop Netdata while it runs under valgrind, press Control-C on the console.

If you omit the parameter --undef-value-errors=no to valgrind, you will get hundreds of errors about conditional jumps that depend on uninitialized values. This is normal. Valgrind has heuristics to prevent it from printing such errors for system libraries, but for the static Netdata binary, all the required libraries are built into Netdata. So, valgrind cannot appply its heuristics and prints them.