VCV Rack plugin build toolchains

Cross-compile Rack plugins for Mac, Windows, and Linux with a single command on any Linux distro.

Building

Clone this repository in a path without spaces, or the Makefile will break.

Obtain MacOSX11.1.sdk.tar.xz using the instructions at https://github.com/tpoechtrager/osxcross#packaging-the-sdk, and place it in the root of this repository. You must have access to a Mac with Xcode 12.4 to generate this SDK package. You must use this specific SDK version to build the toolchains.

There are two ways to build the toolchains:

• Locally on Linux: Uses your system's compilers to build the toolchains.
• In a Docker container: This method uses an Ubuntu 20.04 base image and installs all dependencies necessary to build the toolchains.

Local toolchain build

Requires a Linux host.

Install toolchain build dependencies. On Ubuntu,

sudo make dep-ubuntu

Or on Arch Linux,

sudo make dep-arch-linux

Build toolchains for all three platforms.

make toolchain-all

Each toolchain will take around an hour to build and will require network access, about 8 GB free RAM, and about 15 GB free disk space. The final disk space after building is about 3.7 GB.

Build your plugin.

make -j$(nproc) plugin-build PLUGIN_DIR=...

Built plugin packages are placed in the plugin-build/ directory.

Docker toolchain build

Works on any operating system with Docker installed.

IMPORTANT: Do not invoke the Docker-based toolchain with sudo! There is no need to do so and it will not work correctly.

Instead, follow the instructions to let non-root users manage Docker containers: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/linux-postinstall/

Build the Docker container with toolchains for all platforms.

make docker-build

Optional: Pass number of jobs to use to for the tool chain build with the JOBS environment variable.

JOBS=8 make docker-build

(-j8 will not work due to the different build systems used in the toolchain build process.)

Build your plugin.

make -j8 docker-plugin-build PLUGIN_DIR=...

You may replace 8 with your desired number of parallel jobs, such as your number of logical cores.

Built plugin packages are placed in the plugin-build/ directory.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to @cschol for help with crosstool-ng, Ubuntu, Docker, and testing.