engineering/source/docs/build_on_macos.md

These are common steps to build Notes from source on macOS.

Requirements

macOS Catalina 10.15 (or newer) is required to build Notes.

This guide assumes you already have Xcode Command Line Tools (version 11 or newer) and Homebrew both installed.

Required Homebrew packages:

• git
• qt@6 (qt@5 is also supported, but not recommended)
• cmake
• ninja

Build options

Please refer to build_options.md.

Building

First, use git to clone the project and its components, and then navigate into it:

git clone https://github.com/nuttyartist/notes.git --recurse-submodules
cd notes

Optionally, if you want to dedicate all cores of your CPU to build Notes much faster, set this environment variable:

export CMAKE_BUILD_PARALLEL_LEVEL=$(sysctl -n hw.logicalcpu)

After that, we're ready to build Notes!

Invoke CMake to configure and build the project into a folder called build, in Release mode:

cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build

Alternatively, if you want to target both x86_64 and arm64 (Apple Silicon) architectures in a single, universal binary, invoke CMake like this instead (please note that this might be unsupported on Qt versions older than 6):

cmake -B build -G Ninja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES='x86_64;arm64'

After Notes is built, you can use the macdeployqt tool from Qt to include the required libraries to your app bundle:

macdeployqt 'build/Notes.app' -qmldir=./src/qml -appstore-compliant

You can now install Notes by either dragging the Notes.app folder (found in build/bin), into the Applications folder.

Alternatively, you can run Notes directly by executing build/bin/Notes.app/Contents/MacOS/Notes.