Building Opa

Should you wish to work on an unsupported platform, or to contribute to Opa, you will need to build Opa from sources. This requires a bit more work than the installation, but you should have no major difficulties. You will need:

• git (to download the source)
• ocaml 3.12.0-5 or later
• libgif 4.1 or later (dev version)
• libjpeg 8b-1 or later (dev version)
• libpng 1.2.44 or later (dev version)
• libssl 0.9.8 or later (dev version)
• libxft 2.2.0 or later (dev version)
• m4
• dblatex
• java 1.5 or later
• libx11 1.4.2 or later (dev version)
• zlib 1.2.3.4 or later (dev version)

In addition, if you are using Mac OS X, you will need:

• GNU coreutils, wget, md5sha1sum and gsed (or gnu-sed) available via MacPorts or Homebrew
• The Xcode suite, provided by Apple with your copy of Mac OS X (prior to Mac OS X 10.7 Lion).
• If you do not have Xcode, you can either download Xcode 4 or Xcode 3 (registration required). In addition to general development utilities, this package provides some of the low-level, Mac-specific, tools used by Opa to produce server-side executables.

WARNING:

Starting with Xcode 4.3, Apple does not install command line tools by default anymore, so after Xcode installation, go to Preferences > Downloads > Components > Command Line Tools and click Install. You can also directly download Command Line Tools for Xcode without getting Xcode.

Once these dependencies are satisfied, take the following steps:

• Grab the sources from GitHub by entering in a terminal:

git clone https://github.com/MLstate/opalang.git

• In the same terminal, enter

cd opalang
./configure -prefix SOME_DIRECTORY
make all install

(You may need root privileges). This will install Opa in directory SOME_DIRECTORY

Do not forget to change your PATH variable if needed after that.

TIP:

We also provide a script that will help you install all dependencies needed for building Opa. In this case, the only dependencies should be (tested on clean Ubuntu 11.10) :

• git (to download the source)
• m4
• libssl 0.9.8 or later (dev version)
• zlib 1.2.3.4 or later (dev version)

In your opalang directory, run: tools/dependencies/installation_helper.sh --prefix SOME_DIRECTORY.

You will need to update your PATH variable after that.