Build from Source

This guide walks through building Thunder from a local checkout of the repository. Make sure you have the prerequisites installed before continuing.

Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/thunder-edge/runtime.git
cd deno-edge-runtime

Build with Cargo

Debug build

A debug build compiles faster and includes debug symbols, which is ideal for day-to-day development:

cargo build

The binary is written to target/debug/thunder.

Release build

A release build enables full optimizations. Use this when benchmarking or producing a binary for deployment:

cargo build --release

The binary is written to target/release/thunder.

Build with Make

The repository includes a Makefile with common shortcuts:

# Debug build
make build

# Release build (also copies binary to ./thunder)
make release

# Release build + copy to /usr/local/bin
make install

Run directly with Cargo

During development you can skip the explicit build step and run Thunder in one command:

cargo run -- start

Any arguments after -- are forwarded to the Thunder binary.

Cargo aliases

The project defines several Cargo aliases in .cargo/config.toml for running tests:

Alias	Description
cargo test-dev	Fast local loop — runs workspace tests but skips long E2E and stress tests.
cargo test-full	Full Rust test suite across the entire workspace.
cargo test-server-e2e	Runs only the server E2E tests (useful when working on ingress or admin paths).

A note about V8 compilation

Thunder depends on rusty_v8, which bundles the V8 JavaScript engine. On the first build, Cargo downloads a prebuilt V8 static library from the rusty_v8 releases mirror. If a prebuilt binary is not available for your platform, V8 will be compiled from source, which can take a significant amount of time (30 minutes or more depending on your hardware). Subsequent builds reuse the cached artifact and are much faster.