Building from Source

Prerequisites

• pixi -- Environment and dependency management
• XMake -- Build system (not installed by pixi; install separately)
• Git

Supported Platforms

Platform	Toolchain
Windows (win-64)	MSVC (VS2022)
Linux (linux-64)	GCC 14.2
macOS (osx-arm64)	xclang 23.1.2
Windows (win-64), mingw environment	xclang 23.1.2 (MinGW)

The mingw environment builds for Windows with xclang instead of MSVC: pixi run -e mingw cfg debug, then pixi run -e mingw build.

Build Commands

All builds are managed through pixi tasks:

# Configure the build (mode: debug, release, or releasedbg)
pixi run cfg debug

# Build the project
pixi run build

# Configure in release mode
pixi run cfg release

# Build JavaScript/TypeScript API
pixi run build-js

# Install npm dependencies
pixi run npm-install

Build System

The project uses XMake as the build system, managed through pixi tasks. The C++ standard is C++23.

Build Targets

• catter -- Main CLI executable (the DECISION daemon)
• catter-proxy -- Proxy process manager
• catter-hook-unix -- Unix hook shared library (Linux/macOS)
• catter-hook-win64 -- Windows hook DLL
• catter-core -- Core library
• common -- Shared utilities library

JavaScript Build

The TypeScript API under api/ is compiled to JavaScript and embedded into the catter binary. Build with:

pixi run build-js

This runs rollup to bundle the TypeScript, and the resulting JS is compiled into the binary as a resource.

Key Dependencies

• QuickJS-ng (v0.11.0) -- Embedded JavaScript engine
• spdlog (1.15.3) -- Logging
• kotatsu -- Async runtime, testing framework, option parsing
• MinHook (v1.3.4) -- Windows API hooking (Windows only)