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Building_Widelands_on_macOS

You will need to install Xcode which is available from the App Store.

In this guide, we use Homebrew. If you haven't already, please install it according to the instructions on their website.

Preliminaries

The first step is to choose a compiler. Widelands can be build with GCC or Clang. You have to choose either.

If you want to use Clang, which comes bundled with Xcode, we only need to install the dependencies.

$ brew install boost git cmake doxygen gettext glew graphviz icu4c jpeg libogg libpng libvorbis ninja python sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_mixer sdl2_ttf zlib asio

Installing ccache is also strongly suggested. So that incremental builds do not take ages.

$ brew install ccache

Building with GCC

First, we need to install GCC. 

$ brew install gcc@7

Installing ccache is also strongly suggested.

$ brew install ccache

Then install all the dependencies of Widelands:

$ brew install git cmake doxygen gettext glew graphviz icu4c jpeg libogg libpng libvorbis ninja python sdl2 sdl2_image sdl2_mixer sdl2_ttf zlib asio
$ brew install --cc=gcc-7 boost

Quirks

For newer version of macOS (Monterey 12.01) Cmake has issues locating the icu4c tools. To fix this you need to

brewprefix="`brew --prefix`"
export CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="${brewprefix}/opt/icu4c"

Compiling Widelands

If you just want to compile at first, use

compile.sh

Building Widelands

Now that the compiler and dependencies are installed, we need to check out the source code. An in-depth explanation can be found here.

You may want to use build_app.sh. This script is used to make the daily builds for Widelands. It contains all steps that are needed to build Widelands from scratch, make a Widelands.app bundle and package it into a .dmg.

$ mkdir build_wl
$ cp widelands/utils/macos/build_app.sh build_wl/
$ cd build_wl/

Now we are ready to compile Widelands.

The following description is outdated as ./build_app.sh now calls compile.sh as this is not stable since about macOS 11.x

plase check #5103 and #5202

  • for Clang

    $ ./build_app.sh clang release ../widelands/

  • for GCC

    $ ./build_app.sh gcc release ../widelands/

If you wish to build the Debug version run either of these commands:

  • for Clang

    $ ./build_app.sh clang debug ../widelands/

  • for GCC

    $ ./build_app.sh gcc debug ../widelands/

Changing the compiler

If you should decide to switch your compiler later on, you need to uninstall and install boost again. Otherwise, building will fail.

Clang to GCC

$ brew uninstall boost && brew install --cc=gcc-7 boost

GCC to Clang

$ brew uninstall boost && brew install boost

Known Bugs

  • It is currently not possible to compile a debug build with GCC and ASan enabled.