OCamlbuild is a generic build tool, that has built-in rules for building OCaml library and programs.
In recent years, the OCaml community has converged towards a more recent and faster build tool: Dune. If you are choosing a build system, you should probably use Dune instead. (Between January and June 2019, 77 new OCaml packages using ocamlbuild were publicly released, versus 544 packages using dune.)
Your should refer to the OCambuild manual for more informations on how to use ocamlbuild.
With opam:
opam install ocamlbuild
If you are testing a not yet released version of OCaml, you may need to use the development version of OCamlbuild. With opam:
opam pin add ocamlbuild --kind=git "https://github.com/ocaml/ocamlbuild.git#master"
We assume GNU make, which may be named gmake
on your system.
make configure
The installation location is determined by the installation location
of the ocaml compiler. You can set the following configuration
variables (make configure VAR=foo
):
OCAMLBUILD_{PREFIX,BINDIR,LIBDIR}
will use opam or
ocaml/ocamlfind's settings by default; see configure.make
for the
precise initialization logic.
OCAML_NATIVE
: should be true
if native compilation is available
on your machine, false
otherwise
Compile the sources.
make
Install.
make install
You can also clean the compilation results with make clean
, and
uninstall a manually-installed OCamlbuild with make uninstall
.