Verifying the Emscripten Development Environment

After you’ve installed the SDK or built an Emscripten development environment from sources, the compiler should just work! This section shows how to verify that the environment has been set up correctly, and how to troubleshoot installation problems when they do occur.

Testing the environment

Sanity tests

The first step in verifying the environment is to run Emscripten with --check. The option prints out information about the toolchain and runs some basic sanity tests to check that the required tools are available.

Open a terminal in the directory in which you installed Emscripten (on Windows open the Emscripten Command Prompt). Then call the Emscripten Compiler Frontend (emcc) as shown:

./emcc --check

Note

On Windows, invoke the tool with emcc instead of ./emcc.

For example, the following output reports that the correct version of clang could not be found:

emcc (Emscripten GCC-like replacement + linker emulating GNU ld) 1.21.0
shared:INFO: (Emscripten: Running sanity checks)
emcc: warning: LLVM version for clang executable "/usr/bin/clang" appears incorrect (seeing "16.0", expected "18") [-Wversion-check]

At this point you need to Install and activate any missing components. When everything is set up properly, emcc ---check should give no warnings, and if you just enter emcc (without any input files), it will give an error

emcc: error: no input files

Build a basic example

The next test is to actually build some code! On the command prompt navigate to the Emscripten directory for the current SDK and try to build the hello_world.cpp test code:

cd emscripten/<version of emscripten you installed>
./emcc test/hello_world.cpp

This command should complete without warnings and you should find the newly-compiled JavaScript file (a.out.js) in the current directory.

If compiling succeeds, you’re ready for the Emscripten Tutorial. If not, check out the troubleshooting instructions below.

Run the full test suite

Emscripten has a comprehensive test suite which may be used to further validate all or parts of the toolchain. For more information, see Emscripten Test Suite.

Troubleshooting

First run ./emcc --check and examine the output to find missing components. You can also try ./emcc --clear-cache to empty the compiler’s internal cache and reset it to a known good state.

Installing missing components

Missing tools can often be added using the Emscripten SDK (emsdk). For example, to fix a warning that Java is missing, locate it in the repository, install it, and then set it as active:

#List all the components. Look for the missing component (in this case "java-7.45-64bit")
./emsdk list

#Install the missing component
./emsdk install java-7.45-64bit

#Set the component as active
./emsdk activate java-7.45-64bit

If you’re building Emscripten manually from source, see that link for information on how to obtain all dependencies.