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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.

Building from source

Package repositories

Many package repositories, including source-based repositories like pkgsrc, make it easy to build from source by handling all the dependencies for you. Please refer to instructions provided by the repository.

Unix-like OS (GNU/Linux, BSDs, macOS, illumos-based OS, Solaris, ...)

Build prerequisites

  • A recent version of OCaml compiler (version 4.08 at minimum) together with a C99 compiler (such as gcc, clang) -- see https://ocaml.org/
  • GNU make
  • Basic POSIX tools: sh, sed (optional, for manuals)
Optional, for the GUI only
  • lablgtk3 and its prerequisites (ocamlfind, GTK 3 and its dependencies)

Building

Building from source is as simple as executing:

make

Use gmake in environments where GNU make is not the default. 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. If you want to force building the GUI (or not), type make UISTYLE=gtk3 or make UISTYLE=text.

There is currently no installation provided by the makefile. You can just copy the built binaries to where you need them. The following files are produced:

src/unison              (the main executable)
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)

Building all from scratch

It is very easy to build both the OCaml compiler and Unison from source without using a package repository. Building OCaml has very few prerequisites. If your system has a supported C compiler installed then the following may work out of the box:

# Build OCaml compiler
## In a dir with extracted OCaml source
./configure
make
make install    # you may need elevated privileges

# Build unison
## In a dir with extracted Unison source
make

Building the GTK GUI this way is difficult as both GTK 3 and lablgtk3 must be built and installed.

macOS

Build prerequisites

  • Xcode Command Line Tools (optional, for the native GUI)

Building

For the text user interface and GTK GUI, follow the Unix instructions above.

To build the macOS native GUI, execute:

make UISTYLE=mac

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.

Builds are possible with MS Visual C++ (MSVC) (currently untested and likely not working), MinGW-w64 (currently the best option) and Cygwin GNU C (untested; produced binaries require Cygwin to run).

Tradeoff?

  • MSVC and MinGW can produce statically linked Unison executable.
  • The Cygwin GNU C option requires only free software.

You have to add OSTYPE=$OSTYPE as argument to make: make OSTYPE=$OSTYPE (OSTYPE is preset to 'cygwin' by Cygwin).

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.
  • STATIC: Adding STATIC=true as argument to make will produce a (mostly) statically linked executable. This may not work on all platforms or with all build methods.
  • DEBUGGING: Adding DEBUGGING=false as argument to make will strip debugging symbols from the final executable.