Using the Compiler — Solidity 0.8.33-develop documentation

Using the Commandline Compiler

This section does not apply to solcjs, not even if it is used in commandline mode.

Basic Usage

One of the build targets of the Solidity repository is solc, the Solidity commandline compiler. Using solc --help provides you with an explanation of all options. The compiler can produce various outputs, ranging from simple binaries and assembly over an abstract syntax tree (parse tree) to estimations of gas usage.

If you only want to compile a single file, run:

Compile single file

solc --bin sourceFile.sol

To get several advanced outputs and write them to files:

Compile and output to directory

solc -o outputDirectory --bin --ast-compact-json --asm sourceFile.sol

Optimizer Options

Before you deploy your contract, activate the optimizer when compiling using:

By default, the optimizer will optimize the contract assuming it is called 200 times across its lifetime (it assumes each opcode is executed around 200 times).

- To make initial contract deployment cheaper and later executions more expensive, set `--optimize-runs=1`.
- If you expect many transactions and don't care about higher deployment cost and output size, set `--optimize-runs` to a high number.

This parameter affects things such as:
- the size of the binary search in the function dispatch routine
- the way constants like large numbers or strings are stored

### Base Path and Import Remapping

The commandline compiler will automatically read imported files from the filesystem, but it is also possible to provide [path redirects](https://docs.soliditylang.org/en/v0.8.33/path-resolution.html#import-remapping) using `prefix=path` in the following way:

{% code %}
```bash
solc github.com/ethereum/dapp-bin/=/usr/local/lib/dapp-bin/ file.sol