The build requires the .NET 10 SDK. Linux and macOS builds also require Mono for mcs, vbc, and ilasm, plus PowerShell.

See Getting the Sources for information on getting the source for IronPython2.

Visual Studio 16.4(2019) or above is required to build IronPython2

• Open c:\path\to\ironpython2\IronPython.sln solution file
• Select the configuration options (Release,Debug, etc)
• Press Ctrl+Shift+B or F6 to build the solution

IronPython2 uses PowerShell to run the build and testing from the command line. You can either use a PowerShell directly, or prefix the commands below with powershell on Windows, or pwsh on Linux/macOS.

On macOS, the required ARM64 or x64 tools can be installed with Homebrew:

brew install dotnet mono powershell
git submodule update --init

The Mono compiler and assembler commands must be discoverable through PATH.

Change the working directory to the path where you cloned the sources and run .\make.ps1 on Windows or ./make.ps1 on Linux/macOS.

By default, with no options, make.ps1 will build Release mode binaries. If you would like to build debug binaries, you can run .\make.ps1 debug

Other options available for make.ps1 are

-configuration (debug/release)   The configuration to build for
-platform (x86/x64/Arm64)        The platform to use in running tests; detected automatically
-runIgnored                      Run tests that are marked as ignored in the .ini manifests
-frameworks                      A comma separated list of frameworks to run tests for 
                                 (use nomenclature as is used in msbuild files for TargetFrameworks)

There are also other targets available for use with packaging and testing, most come in debug and release (default) versions, such as package-debug and package

package                         Creates packages supported by the current platform
stage                           Stages files ready for packaging
test-*                          Runs tests from `all` categories, `ironpython` specific tests, 
                                `cpython` tests from the C Python stdlib test suite, `smoke` a small
                                set of tests

If the build is successful, binaries are stored in ironpython2/bin/{ConfigurationName}/{Framework}. The macOS launcher is bin/Release/net10.0/ipy.

For a release build, smoke test, and distribution containing the complete Python standard library:

./make.ps1 clean
./make.ps1 release
./make.ps1 test-smoke
./make.ps1 stage
Package/Release/Stage/IronPython-*/net10.0/ipy -c 'import sys; print(sys.version)'