Hello! I have a question: how do you distribute OCaml binaries for MacOS? Until now, I’ve used GitHub Actions to build a binary on a Mac machine, and then just distribute that. (Just like this topic suggests) But apparently, it’s linking against some HOMEBREW libraries. Some user might not have t…

Hi :slightly_smiling_face: OSnap does build a statically linked binary for mac. As far as I remember, you have to tell dune to link to the static libraries (.a files). OSnap does this with libspng and libz here: OSnap/lib/OSnap_Diff/config/discover.ml at master · eWert-Online/OSnap · GitHub . This p…

Thanks a lot! Yes, that does help :slight_smile:

See my, and others’ comments here for some more advice: [image] Building Mac executables for older OSes Ecosystem Setting both MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET and SDKROOT (after installing the correct SDK) worked as desired. We have an executable compiled on OSX11 wh…

If you are interested in building universal or ‘fat’ binaries, this other thread may be useful as well: [image] Building for MacOS x86 and arm64 with setup-ocaml Ecosystem This thread seems to be at the top of search results for “ocaml universal binary”, so fo…

@eWert-Online I tried something similar to your example (passing -cclib <path to .a>) but the homebrew dynamic library is still picked, according to otool… I’ll continue to try to understand why. Thanks @WardBrian and @JohnWhitington for your help too! [image] WardBrian: If you are interested …

Distributing OCaml binaries for MacOS

Ecosystem

JohnWhitington August 12, 2025, 7:50pm 4

See my, and others’ comments here for some more advice:

Topic		Replies	Views
Packaging an executable for homebrew install for non-OCaml users Learning build , homebrew	17	1273	August 17, 2023
Building for MacOS x86 and arm64 with setup-ocaml Ecosystem	4	733	January 2, 2025
Easy way to build and distribute OCaml executables for all the popular platforms? Ecosystem	3	2792	March 23, 2022
Generating static and portable executables with OCaml Community ocaml	8	4631	October 24, 2021
Cross Platform (MacOSX/*nix) static linking Ecosystem lwt , jbuilder , ssl , libev , esy	3	1838	September 7, 2018

Distributing OCaml binaries for MacOS

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