Compile on MacOS

Overview
This page describes how to compile the FreeCAD source code on MacOS X. For other platforms, see Compiling.

These instructions have been tested on macOS Catalina with standard XCode 11.6. It is known to work on macOS BigSur Beta with XCode 12.0 beta. If you plan to use XCode Beta, please be sure to download Command Line Tools add on through a dmg package to workaround some libz dependency issues.

This page serves as a quick start, and is not intended to be comprehensive with regard to describing all the available build options.

If you just want to evaluate the latest pre-release build of FreeCAD, you can download pre-built binaries from here.

Install Prerequisites
The following software must be installed to support the build process.

Homebrew Package Manager
Homebrew is a command line based package manager for macOS. The Homebrew main page provides an installation command line that you simply paste into a terminal window.

CMake
CMake is a build tool that generates a build configuration based on variables you specify. You then issue the 'make' command to actually build that configuration. The command-line version of CMake is automatically installed as part of the Homebrew installation, above. If you prefer to use a GUI version of CMake, you can download it from here.

Install Dependencies
FreeCAD maintains a Homebrew 'tap' which installs the required formulas and dependencies. Issue the following brew commands in your terminal.

may take quite a while, so you may want go grab a beverage. :-).

The following manual-installation section is a work in progress...

Alternately, you can install the individual dependencies manually by installing the following packages using
 * - Only Qt5 is currently supported, support for Qt6 is a work-in-progress
 * - Only Qt5 is currently supported, support for Qt6 is a work-in-progress
 * - Only Qt5 is currently supported, support for Qt6 is a work-in-progress
 * - Only Qt5 is currently supported, support for Qt6 is a work-in-progress
 * - Only Qt5 is currently supported, support for Qt6 is a work-in-progress
 * - Only Qt5 is currently supported, support for Qt6 is a work-in-progress
 * - Only Qt5 is currently supported, support for Qt6 is a work-in-progress
 * - Only Qt5 is currently supported, support for Qt6 is a work-in-progress
 * - Only Qt5 is currently supported, support for Qt6 is a work-in-progress

There are several packages that are only available when you have tapped the freecad cask: you must do that and then install

In some cases the packages installed by Homebrew do not use the same Python version: for example, at the time of this writing PySide2 uses Python 3.10, but boost-python3 uses Python 3.11. While it is possible to "roll back" the more advanced version (so that in this case boost-python3 uses Python 3.10) this an advanced operation, and in many cases it is best to wait for an update to the other package.

When running cMake, you may need to explicitly specify the directory to search for Python in, to prevent the system Python from being selected (which probably will not match the version used by PySide and Shiboken in your homebrew install). Set when using a conventional Homebrew install of Python.

You will need to set the path to Qt -- Qt5 is currently supported, while support for Qt6 is a work-in-progress. Set FREECAD_QT_VERSION to "auto" or "5" to select Qt5. In a normal Qt5 installation, set (where the X is replaced by your actual minor version).

Get the source
In the following instructions, the source and build folders are created side-by-side under

but you can use whatever folders you want.

The following command will clone the FreeCAD git repository into a directory called FreeCAD-git.

Create the build folder.

Run CMake
Next, we will run CMake to generate the build configuration. Several options must be passed to CMake. The following table describes the options and gives some background.

CMake Options
Note: Command line to generate CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH:

ls -d $(brew list -1 | grep qt | tail -1 | xargs brew --cellar)/*/lib/cmake

CMake GUI
Open the CMake app, and fill in the source and build folder fields. In this example, it would be /Users/username/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-git for the source, and /Users/username/FreeCAD/build for the build folder.

Next, click the Configure button to populate the list of configuration options. This will display a dialog asking you to specify what generator to use. Leave it at the default Unix Makefiles. Configuring will fail the first time because there are some options that need to be changed. Note: You will need to check the Advanced checkbox to get all of the options.

Set options from the table above, then click Configure again and then Generate.

CMake command line
Enter the following in the terminal.

Run make
Finally, from a terminal run make to compile and link FreeCAD, and generate the app bundle.

The -j option specifies how many make processes to run at once. One plus the number of CPU cores is usually a good number to use. However, if compiling fails for some reason, it is useful to rerun make without the -j option, so that you can see exactly where the error occurred.

See also Compiling - Speeding up.

If make finishes without any errors, you can now launch FreeCAD by double clicking the executable in the Finder.

Updating from Github
FreeCAD development happens fast; every day or so there are bug fixes or new features. To get the latest changes, use git to update the source directory (see Source code management), then re-run the CMake and make steps above. It is not usually necessary to start with a clean build directory in this case, and subsequent compiles will generally go much faster than the first one.

Building with Qt4 and Python 2.7
FreeCAD has transitioned from Qt 4 to Qt 5 as well as homebrew. Qt 4 is no longer available as an option for new build on macOS following Qt 5 transition. Python 2.7 has been deprecated within homebrew and upcoming macOS and we do not support it anymore for macOS build either.

Segfault on Qt5 launch
If Qt4 was previously installed via brew, and you then build with Qt5, you may get a EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SEGSEGV) exception when launching the new Qt5 build. The fix for this is to manually uninstall Qt4.

Fortran
"No CMAKE_Fortran_COMPILER could be found." during configuration - Older versions of FreeCAD will need a fortran compiler installed. With Homebrew, do "brew install gcc" and try configuring again, giving cmake the path to Fortran ie -DCMAKE_Fortran_COMPILER=/opt/local/bin/gfortran-mp-4.9. Or, preferably use a more current version of FreeCAD source!

FreeType
When using CMake versions older than 3.1.0, it's necessary to set CMake variable FREETYPE_INCLUDE_DIR_freetype2 manually, eg /usr/local/include/freetype2

Additional Build Instructions
FreeCAD can be built against the latest git master hosted on github, and launched from a CLI using libraries provided by the homebrew-freecad tap. For a complete list of build instructions see here.