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Installing Unison

Pre-built binaries

The easiest and quickest way is to install pre-built binaries available at many package repositories. The caveat: some repositories are slow to update and often include a very old version of Unison.

Alternatively, some pre-built binaries are made available at https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison/releases for macOS, Linux and Windows. No specific installation is needed, just unpack the files at a location of your choosing.

Building from source

Packaging systems

Many packaging systems, including source-based systems like pkgsrc and binary repositories like Debian GNU/Linux, make it easy to build from source by handling all the dependencies for you and encoding the unison build recipe. Please refer to instructions provided by the packaging system. (Issues about packaging systems should be filed with those systems, and not in the unison issue tracker.)

Mostly-POSIX systems (GNU/Linux, BSDs, macOS, illumos-based OS, Solaris) and Cygwin

Build prerequisites

  • A C99 compiler (e.g. gcc, clang)
  • A recent version of OCaml compiler (version 4.08 at minimum) -- see https://ocaml.org/. (Note that ocaml upstream says that 5.x is experimental. The standard approach is the most recent 4.x ocaml release.)
  • GNU make
  • Basic POSIX tools: install, rm, sh
Optional, for the GUI only
  • lablgtk3 and its prerequisites (GTK 3 and its dependencies)
  • ocamlfind (there is backup code to operate without it in some circumstances)
Optional, on BSDs
  • libinotify (optional, for building unison-fsmonitor)
Optional, for building the user manual
  • sed
  • LaTeX
  • pdf2ps (optional, for PS output; included with Ghostscript, for example)
  • HEVEA (https://hevea.inria.fr/) (optional, for HTML and text formats)
  • Lynx (optional, for text format)
  • (for developers only) HEVEA and Lynx are required to re-build the manual included in the Unison binary

Building

To build from source, first ensure that all prerequisites are installed. See each prerequisite's documentation for instructions, or use a package manager.

Building from source is as simple as changing to the source directory and executing:

gmake

where gmake is the command to run GNU make. (Usually, GNU make is available as "gmake", but on some systems it is only available as "make".) If you are using OPAM then opam exec -- make may work for you, as opam needs to set up a specific environment.

Presence of lablgtk3 is detected automatically to build the GUI. If you want to build only the GUI, type make gui. You can type make tui if you have lablgtk3 installed but don't want the GUI built. Type make fsmonitor to build only the filesystem monitor.

To install:

  • set $PREFIX in the environment if you don't want /usr/local
  • optionally set $DESTDIR
  • run gmake install.

The set of installed files (paths from the source directory) should be

src/unison              (the main executable for TUI/CLI)
src/unison-gui          (the main executable for GUI)
src/unison-fsmonitor    (optional, on some build platforms)
src/fsmonitor.py        (optional, if unison-fsmonitor is not built)
man/unison.1            (optional, manual page)
doc/unison-manual.*     (optional, user manual in different formats)

Cross-compiling for a different target architecture or OS

To cross-compile for a different target, you need to have a cross-compilation toolchain including both a cross-compiling C compiler and a cross-compiling OCaml compiler. When you have cross-compilation toolchain in place, building Unison from source works according to instructions above. You just have to add a TOOL_PREFIX argument to gmake to indicate which toolchain to use (and ensure the tools are in $PATH).

For example, to build a native Windows 64-bit executable using the MinGW cross-compilation toolchain:

gmake TOOL_PREFIX=x86_64-w64-mingw32-

Building the manual page and documentation does not work when cross-compiling. To build the documentation, first build Unison without cross-compilation.

macOS

First, note that macOS is a mostly-POSIX system and see that section above.

Second, note that macOS by default is missing a number of expected tools, including POSIX-required system headers (e.g. all of /usr/include). The standard approach on macOS is to install either Command Line Tools or Xcode, so that one has a working C99/mostly-POSIX environment. These also allow building against the libraries required for the mac-native GUI.

Building

The mostly-POSIX instructions above will build the text user interface, the GTK GUI and, if you have native GUI headers/libs, also the macOS native GUI.

To build only the macOS native GUI, execute:

make macui

The built application will be located at src/uimac/build/Default/Unison.app.

Windows

Building on Windows is currently somewhat complicated. All methods require Cygwin as a POSIX-like layer for Windows. Cygwin is required for the build process only; the build can produce fully native Windows binaries that don't require Cygwin to run. To build Unison for usage within Cygwin environment, follow build instructions for Unix-like OS above.

Builds are possible with MS Visual C++ (MSVC) (currently untested and likely not working) and MinGW-w64 (currently the best option) compilers.

The build system automatically detects if the build is of MSVC, MinGW or Cygwin GNU C (not native Windows) type based on the first OCaml compiler (ocamlc and ocamlopt) found on PATH. Thus, if you have multiple compilers, you can easily select between these methods by adjusting the PATH accordingly when running make.

MinGW

Building with MinGW, you still need a Cygwin installation as the build environment. It is not required to run the produced executables. You need to have the following prerequisites:

  • MinGW gcc and MinGW binutils (Cygwin package example mingw64-x86_64-gcc-core)
  • A recent version of OCaml compiler (version 4.08 at minimum) which itself is built with MinGW gcc (it is possible to find pre-compiled binaries); do not use the Cygwin OCaml package as that is not compiled with MinGW
  • GNU make
  • A POSIX shell (available in Cygwin by default)

To build, change to directory where Unison source code is and execute:

make

If all goes well, the following files will be produced:

src/unison.exe              (the main executable for TUI/CLI)
src/unison-gui.exe          (the main executable for GUI, optional, see below)
src/unison-fsmonitor.exe    (filesystem monitor, optional)

You can check which DLLs are needed by the built binary by executing cygcheck src/unison.exe or ldd src/unison.exe.

For building the GUI (optional), you also need the following:

  • MinGW GTK 3 and its dependencies (Cygwin package example mingw64-x86_64-gtk3)
  • Some MinGW GTK icon theme (optional, but recommended; Cygwin package example mingw64-x86_64-adwaita-icon-theme)
  • lablgtk3 and its prerequisites (ocamlfind, dune build system)

Building lablgtk3 from source is complicated. It is recommended to use OPAM for that (Cygwin package name opam). Make sure that OPAM uses the MinGW version of gcc and binutils.

MSVC

Building with MSVC is in principle similar to building with MinGW, except that the C compiler is now MSVC and the OCaml compiler must itself be built with MSVC (it is possible to find pre-compiler binaries). Environment for MSVC must be set up properly so that it can be used from Cygwin environment.

Build options

There are some additional options that control the build process:

  • NATIVE: If you can't compile a native binary for your platform then add NATIVE=false as argument to make. This will produce a single native executable with OCaml runtime and Unison bytecode embedded.
  • CFLAGS, CPPFLAGS, LDFLAGS, LDLIBS control the build process as usual. OCaml compiler will pass these arguments on to the C compiler and linker.
  • To produce a statically linked executable, add arguments suitable for your platform and toolchain in your LDFLAGS. Static linking mostly makes no difference because some widely-used C libraries, like glibc, do not allow static linking, GTK does not allow static linking and there is nothing to link statically for the textual user interface in Windows and Cygwin. Examples of LDFLAGS values to enable static linking: -static or -Wl,-static for gcc (should also work for clang); -link -static for gcc in Windows (MinGW, Cygwin, MSYS2) ("-link" is required due to flexlink being used in the toolchain).