Buildroot is designed to run on Linux systems.
While Buildroot itself will build most host packages it needs for the compilation, certain standard Linux utilities are expected to be already installed on the host system. Below you will find an overview of the mandatory and optional packages (note that package names may vary between distributions).
Build tools:
which
sed
make (version 3.81 or any later)
binutils
build-essential (only for Debian based systems)
diffutils
gcc (version 4.8 or any later)
g++ (version 4.8 or any later)
bash
patch
gzip
bzip2
perl (version 5.8.7 or any later)
tar
cpio
unzip
rsync
file (must be in /usr/bin/file)
bc
findutils
Source fetching tools:
wget
Recommended dependencies:
Some features or utilities in Buildroot, like the legal-info, or the graph generation tools, have additional dependencies. Although they are not mandatory for a simple build, they are still highly recommended:
python (version 2.7 or any later)
Configuration interface dependencies:
For these libraries, you need to install both runtime and development data, which in many distributions are packaged separately. The development packages typically have a -dev or -devel suffix.
ncurses5 to use the menuconfig interface
qt5 to use the xconfig interface
glib2, gtk2 and glade2 to use the gconfig interface
Source fetching tools:
In the official tree, most of the package sources are retrieved using
wget from ftp, http or https locations. A few packages are only
available through a version control system. Moreover, Buildroot is
capable of downloading sources via other tools, like git or scp
(refer to Chapter 20, Download infrastructure for more details). If you enable
packages using any of these methods, you will need to install the
corresponding tool on the host system:
bazaar
curl
cvs
git
mercurial
scp
sftp
subversion
Java-related packages, if the Java Classpath needs to be built for the target system:
javac compiler
jar tool
Documentation generation tools:
asciidoc, version 8.6.3 or higher
w3m
python with the argparse module (automatically present in 2.7+ and 3.2+)
dblatex (required for the pdf manual only)
Graph generation tools:
graphviz to use graph-depends and <pkg>-graph-depends
python-matplotlib to use graph-build
Package statistics tools (pkg-stats):
python-aiohttp