Dune - A Composable Build System

Dune is a build system designed for OCaml/Reason projects only. It
focuses on providing the user with a consistent experience and takes
care of most low-level details of OCaml compilations. It's merely necessary
to provide a description of your project, and Dune will
do the rest.

It implements a scheme that's inspired from the one used inside Jane
Street and adapted to the open source world. It has matured over a
long time and is used daily by hundreds of developers, meaning
it's highly tested and productive.

Dune comes with a manual. If you want to get started
without reading too much, look at the quick start
guide or watch this introduction video.

The example directory contains examples of projects using
dune.

Overview

Dune reads project metadata from dune files, which are either
static files in a simple S-expression syntax or OCaml scripts. It uses
this information to setup build rules, generate configuration files
for development tools such as Merlin, handle installation,
etc.

Dune itself is fast, has very low overhead, and supports parallel
builds on all platforms. It has no system dependencies. OCaml is all you need
to build Dune and packages using Dune. You don't need
make or bash, as long as the packages themselves don't use bash
explicitly.

In particular, one can install OCaml on Windows with a binary installer
and then use only the Windows Console to build Dune and packages
using Dune.

Strengths

Composable

Take n repositories that use Dune and arrange them in any way on the
file system. The result is still a single repository that Dune
knows how to build at once.

This make simultaneous development on multiple packages trivial.

Gracefully Handles Multi-Package Repositories

Dune knows how to handle repositories containing several
packages. When building via Opam, it is able to correctly use
libraries that were previously installed, even if they are already
present in the source tree.

The magic invocation is:

$ dune build --only-packages <package-name> @install

Building Against Several Configurations at Once

Dune can build a given source code repository against
several configurations simultaneously. This helps maintaining packages
across several versions of OCaml, as you can test them all at once
without hassle.

In particular, this makes it easy to handle cross-compilation.

This feature requires Opam.

Requirements

Dune requires OCaml version 4.08.0 to build itself and can build OCaml
projects using OCaml 4.02.3 or greater.

Installation

We recommended installing Dune via the Opam package manager:

$ opam install dune

If you are new to Opam, make sure to run eval $(opam config env) to
make dune available in your PATH. The dune binary is self-contained
and relocatable, so you can safely copy it somewhere else to
make it permanently available.

You can also build it manually with:

$ make release
$ make install

If you do not have make, you can do the following:

$ ocaml boot/bootstrap.ml
$ ./dune.exe build -p dune --profile dune-bootstrap
$ ./dune.exe install dune

The first command builds the dune.exe binary. The second builds the
additional files installed by Dune, such as the man pages, and
the last simply installs all of that on the system.

Please note: unless you ran the optional ./configure script, you can
simply copy dune.exe anywhere and it will just work. dune is
fully relocatable and discovers its environment at runtime rather than
hard-coding it at compilation time.

Support

If you have questions about Dune, you can send an email to
ocaml-core@googlegroups.com or open a ticket on GitHub.

Migration from Jbuilder

Dune was formerly known as Jbuilder. Migration from Jbuilder to Dune is
described in the manual.

Status

Dune is fairly stable and used by the majority of packages on
Opam. Note that Dune retains backward compatibility with Jbuilder, and
in particular, existing Jbuilder projects will continue to be buildable
with Dune.