build tectonic with vcpkg on macOS

This tutorial will walk you through how to build a mostly staticly linked tectonic binary on macOS. Why does this matter? Static binaries are more portable and so free you from having to support complex user environments. Thanks to mcgoo's work we can use vcpkg. vcpkg is a C/C++ package manager from Microsoft.

prerequisites

This guide assumes you have git installed and are comfortable using the command-line. You'll also need to install homebrew to install for vcpkg's gcc dependency. Package management is fun.

1. install gcc:

brew install gcc

setting up your environment

1. Install vcpkg

   1. Clone the vcpkg repository:

      git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/vcpkg
      

   2. Install it for your system:

      ./bootstrap-vcpkg.sh
      

2. Install tectonic dependencies using vcpkg. * Run the following command in your checkout of the vcpkg repository sh ./vcpkg install freetype harfbuzz\[icu,graphite2\] It should print something like the following:

   $ ./vcpkg install freetype harfbuzz\[icu,graphite2\]
   The following packages will be built and installed:
   * bzip2[core]:x64-osx
   	freetype[core]:x64-osx
   * gettext[core]:x64-osx
   * graphite2[core]:x64-osx
   	harfbuzz[core,graphite2,icu,ucdn]:x64-osx
   * icu[core]:x64-osx
   * libiconv[core]:x64-osx
   * libpng[core]:x64-osx
   * ragel[core]:x64-osx
   * zlib[core]:x64-osx
   Additional packages (*) will be modified to complete this operation.
   Starting package 1/10: graphite2:x64-osx
   Building package graphite2[core]:x64-osx...
   

build tectonic

Now we only need to configure tectonic so it knows we are using vcpkg to build the binary.

1. Run cargo build with the appropriate environment variables:

   TECTONIC_DEP_BACKEND="vcpkg" VCPKG_ROOT=/Users/me/vcpkg/ cargo build --release
   

You'll need to set VCPKG_ROOT to the full path of your vcpkg checkout. TECTONIC_DEP_BACKEND="vcpkg" tells tectonic to use vcpkg instead of trying to resolve the libraries using pkgconfig. VCPKG_ROOT=/Users/me/vcpkg/ is the root of the vcpkg tree where we just installed the required libraries.

This will take a couple minutes but should eventually print something like:

    Finished release [optimized] target(s) in 3m 39s

Congratulations! You should now have a mostly staticly linked binary in target/release suitable for sharing with users or whatever your needs are.

caveats

I say mostly staticly linked because the binary itself presumes system libraries. You can observe those links by executing otool on a given binary:

otool -L target/release/tectonic

In my case it printed the following:

target/release/tectonic:
	/System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Versions/C/Foundation (compatibility version 300.0.0, current version 1454.98.0)
	/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation (compatibility version 150.0.0, current version 1454.98.0)
	/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/CoreGraphics (compatibility version 64.0.0, current version 1161.21.2)
	/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreText.framework/Versions/A/CoreText (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
	/System/Library/Frameworks/AppKit.framework/Versions/C/AppKit (compatibility version 45.0.0, current version 1561.60.100)
	/usr/lib/libc++.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 400.9.0)
	/System/Library/Frameworks/Security.framework/Versions/A/Security (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 58286.70.14)
	/usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1252.50.4)
	/usr/lib/libresolv.9.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.0.0)
	/usr/lib/libobjc.A.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 228.0.0)