Compiling for macOS

Requirements

For compiling under macOS, the following is required:

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

Note

If you have Homebrew installed, you can easily install SCons and yasm using the following command:

brew install scons yasm

Installing Homebrew will also fetch the Command Line Tools for Xcode automatically if you don’t have them already.

See also

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

Compiling

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

scons platform=osx --jobs=$(sysctl -n hw.logicalcpu)

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 an optimized editor binary built with scons p=osx target=release_debug:

[email protected]:~/godot$ cp -r misc/dist/osx_tools.app ./Godot.app
[email protected]:~/godot$ mkdir -p Godot.app/Contents/MacOS
[email protected]:~/godot$ cp bin/godot.osx.tools.64 Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot
[email protected]:~/godot$ chmod +x Godot.app/Contents/MacOS/Godot

Cross-compiling for macOS from Linux

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

Clone the OSXCross repository somewhere on your machine (or download a ZIP file and extract it somewhere), e.g.:

[email protected]:~$ git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross.git "$HOME/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.:

[email protected]:~$ export OSXCROSS_ROOT="$HOME/osxcross"

Now you can compile with SCons like you normally would:

[email protected]:~/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:

[email protected]:~/godot$ scons platform=osx osxcross_sdk=darwin15