Opam is a source-based package manager for OCaml. It supports multiple simultaneous compiler installations, flexible package constraints, and a Git-friendly development workflow.

Opam was created and is maintained by OCamlPro.

To get started, checkout the Install and Usage guides.

Either from an existing opam installation, use opam pin add opam-devel --dev, or:

• Make sure you have the required dependencies installed:
  • GNU make
  • OCaml >= 4.02.3 (or see below)
  • A C++ compiler (unless building without a solver, see ./configure --without-mccs)
• Run ./configure
• Run make lib-ext as advertised by ./configure if you don't have the dependencies installed. This will locally take care of all OCaml dependencies for you (downloading them, unless you used the inclusive archive we provide for each release).
• Run make
• Run make install

This is all you need for installing and using opam, but if you want to use the opam-lib (to work on opam-related tools), you need to link it to installed libraries, rather than use make lib-ext which would cause conflicts. It's easier to already have a working opam installation in this case, so you can do it as a second step.

• Make sure to have ocamlfind, ocamlgraph, cmdliner >= 0.9.8, cudf >= 0.7, dose3 >= 5, re >= 1.5.0, opam-file-format installed. Or run opam install opam-lib --deps-only if you already have a working instance. Re-run ./configure once done
• Run make libinstall at the end

If you are developing OPAM, you may enable developer features by including the --enable-developer-mode parameter with ./configure.

BUILDING ON WINDOWS IS A WORK-IN-PROGRESS AND THESE INSTRUCTIONS WILL EVOLVE!

Cygwin (https://www.cygwin.com/setup-x86_64.exe) is always required to build opam on Windows. Both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of Cygwin may be used (you can build 32-bit opam using 64-bit Cygwin and vice versa though note that you must be running 64-bit Windows in order to build the 64-bit version).

The following Cygwin packages are required:

• From Devel - make
• From Devel - patch (not required if OCaml and all required packages are pre-installed)
• From Interpreters - m4 (unless required packages are pre-installed or built using make lib-ext rather than make lib-pkg - m4 is required by findlib's build system)
• From Devel - mingw64-i686-gcc-core & mingw64-x86_64-gcc-core (not required if building with MSVC)

Alternatively, having downloaded Cygwin's setup program, Cygwin can be installed using the following command line:

setup-x86_64 --root=C:\cygwin64 --quiet-mode --no-desktop --no-startmenu --packages=make,mingw64-i686-gcc-core,mingw64-x86_64-gcc-core,m4,patch

The --no-desktop and --no-startmenu switches may be omitted in order to create shortcuts on the Desktop and Start Menu respectively. Executed this way, setup will still be interactive, but the packages will have been pre-selected. To make setup fully unattended, choose a mirror URL from https://cygwin.com/mirrors.lst and add the --site switch to the command line (e.g. --site=https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/sourceware.org/pub/cygwin/).

It is recommended that you set the CYGWIN environment variable to nodosfilewarning winsymlinks:native.

Cygwin is started either from a shortcut or by running:

C:\cygwin64\bin\mintty -

It is recommended that opam be built outside Cygwin's root (so in /cygdrive/c/...). From an elevated Cygwin shell, edit /etc/fstab and ensure that the file's content is exactly:

none /cygdrive cygdrive noacl,binary,posix=0,user 0 0

The change is the addition of the noacl option to the mount instructions for /cygdrive and this stops from Cygwin from attempting to emulate POSIX permissions over NTFS (which can result in strange and unnecessary permissions showing up in Windows Explorer). It is necessary to close and restart all Cygwin terminal windows after changing /etc/fstab.

opam is able to be built without a pre-installed OCaml compiler. For the MSVC ports of OCaml, the Microsoft Windows SDK 7 or later or Microsoft Visual Studio is required (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=8442 - either x86 or x64 may be installed, as appropriate to your system). It is not necessary to modify PATH, INCLUDE or LIB - opam's build system will automatically detect the required changes.

If OCaml is not pre-installed, run:

make compiler [OCAML_PORT=mingw64|mingw|msvc64|msvc|auto]

The OCAML_PORT variable determines which flavour of Windows OCaml is compiled - auto will attempt to guess. As long as gcc is not installed in Cygwin (i.e. the native C compiler for Cygwin), OCAML_PORT does not need to be specified and auto will be assumed. Once the compiler is built, you may run:

make lib-pkg

to install the dependencies as findlib packages to the compiler. Building lib-pkg requires the ability to create native symbolic links (and the CYGWIN variable must include winsymlinks:native) - this means that either Cygwin must be run elevated from an account with administrative privileges or your user account must be granted the SeCreateSymbolicLinkPrivilege either by enabling Developer mode on Windows 10, or using Local Security Policy on earlier versions of Windows. Alternatively, you may run configure and use make lib-ext, as advised.

You can then configure and build opam as above.

make cold is provided as a facility to compile OCaml, then bootstrap opam. You don't need need to run ./configure in that case, but you may specify CONFIGURE_ARGS if needed, e.g.:

make cold CONFIGURE_ARGS="--prefix ~/local"
make cold-install

NOTE: You'll still need GNU make.

Have a bug or a feature request ? Please open an issue on our bug-tracker. Please search for existing issues before posting, and include the output of opam config report and any details that may help track down the issue.

The main documentation entry point to opam is the user manual, available using opam --help. To get help for a specific command, use opam <command> --help.

A collection of guides and tutorials is available online. They are generated from the files in doc/pages.

A more thorough technical document describing opam and specifying the package description format is available in the developer manual. make doc will otherwise make the API documentation available under doc/.

Keep track of development and community news.

• Have a question that's not a feature request or bug report? Ask on the mailing list.

• Chat with fellow opamers on IRC. On the irc.freenode.net server, in the #ocaml or the #opam channel.

We welcome contributions ! Please use Github's pull-request mechanism against the master branch of the opam repository. If that's not an option for you, you can use git format-patch and email us.

The release cycle respects Semantic Versioning.

• ocaml/opam-repository is the official repository for opam packages and compilers. A number of non-official repositories are also available on the interwebs, for instance on Github.
• opam2web generates a collection of browsable HTML files for a given repository. It is used to generate https://opam.ocaml.org.
• opam-rt is the regression framework for opam.
• opam-publish is a tool to facilitate the creation, update and publication of opam packages.

The version comparison function in src/core/opamVersionCompare.ml is part of the Dose library and Copyright 2011 Ralf Treinen.

All other code is:

Copyright 2012-2016 OCamlPro Copyright 2012 INRIA

All rights reserved. Opam is distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1, with the special exception on linking described in the file LICENSE.

Opam is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.