Building on Apple Silicon

[John Ralls]

Tom,

There shouldn’t be any long-standing problems. There are occasional glitches because of shifting dependencies. That said, getting everything set up correctly can be a bit complicated and very few people besides me use it so it tends to have some rough edges for newcomers.

If you’d rather not mess with it there’s a simpler workaround: I make a dependencies tarball so that CI jobs don’t have to build the universe before building and testing GnuCash. You could use that instead of building everything yourself. The tarball can be downloaded from https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnucash/files/Dependencies/gnucash-5.15-mac-dependencies.tar.xz/download and you can get an idea of how to use it from the CI workflow; https://github.com/Gnucash/gnucash/blob/stable/.github/workflows/mac-tests.yaml. Notice that it doesn’t have ninja or Googletest. You’ve presumably already gotten ninja installed in ~/.new-local/bin by virtue of having run gtk-osx-setup.sh. Googletest lives at https://github.com/google/googletest/. You can clone it or get a release tarball; just put the sources in the same directory that you clone GnuCash to.

If you’d rather get a full gtk-osx environment going then start a discussion at https://github.com/jralls/gtk-osx-build/discussions/.

Regards,
John Ralls


> On Jun 29, 2026, at 17:54, Tom Teixeira <tjteixeira at earthlink.net> wrote:
> 
> New developer here. I submitted a pull request for a fix to a bug I filed having built and tested on an Ubuntu virtual machine because of familiarity developing in a Linux environment. But I would like to be able to build a version of gnucash with my changes to use on a daily basis. I have tried to follow the instructions at https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/MacOS/Quartz and got stuck. I've tried the procedure at gtk.org "Setting up GTK for Mac OS" (https://www.gtk.org/docs/installations/macos) as well. I gather there are long standing problems with GTK for ARM affecting this. Is there a simple workaround?
> 
> 
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