Compiling for macOS

Requirements

For compiling under Linux or other Unix variants, the following is required:

  • Python 2.7+ or Python 3.5+
  • SCons build system
  • Xcode (or the more lightweight Command Line Tools for Xcode)
  • Optional - yasm (for WebM SIMD optimizations)

See also

For a general overview of SCons usage for Godot, see Introduction to the buildsystem.

Compiling

Start a terminal, go to the root dir of the engine source code and type:

user@host:~/godot$ scons platform=osx

If all goes well, the resulting binary executable will be placed in the “bin” subdirectory. This executable file contains the whole engine and runs without any dependencies. Executing it will bring up the project manager.

To create an .app like in the official builds, you need to use the template located in misc/dist/osx_tools.app. Typically, for a “.64” optimised binary built with scons p=osx target=release_debug:

user@host:~/godot$ cp -r misc/dist/osx_tools.app ./Godot.app
user@host:~/godot$ mkdir -p Godot.app/Contents/MacOS
user@host:~/godot$ cp bin/godot.osx.tools.64 Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot
user@host:~/godot$ chmod +x Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot

Compiling for 32 and 64-bit

All macOS versions after 10.6 are 64-bit exclusive, so the executable will be a “.64” file by default for most users. If you would like to compile a “.fat” executable which contains both 32 and 64-bit code, you can do so by specifying the bits in the scons command like so:

user@host:~/godot$ scons platform=osx bits=fat

Cross-compiling

It is possible to compile for macOS in a Linux environment (and maybe also in Windows with Cygwin). For that you will need OSXCross to be able to use macOS as target. First, follow the instructions to install it:

Clone the OSXCross repository <https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross> somewhere on your machine (or download a zip file and extract it somewhere), e.g.:

user@host:~$ git clone https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross.git /home/myuser/sources/osxcross
  1. Follow the instructions to package the SDK: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross#packaging-the-sdk
  2. Follow the instructions to install OSXCross: https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross#installation

After that, you will need to define the OSXCROSS_ROOT as the path to the OSXCross installation (the same place where you cloned the repository/extracted the zip), e.g.:

user@host:~$ export OSXCROSS_ROOT=/home/myuser/sources/osxcross

Now you can compile with SCons like you normally would:

user@host:~/godot$ scons platform=osx

If you have an OSXCross SDK version different from the one expected by the SCons buildsystem, you can specify a custom one with the osxcross_sdk argument:

user@host:~/godot$ scons platform=osx osxcross_sdk=darwin15