Building SFML 2 with C++11 on OS X

It's not a very difficult thing to do, but clear, simple instructions can be useful. Thankfully, there's a good Getting Started guide with official documentation for building SFML (and you really should read it). If, after reading that, you want things spelled out even more... here you go.

Step 1: Prepare Xcode

Make sure you have Xcode downloaded and installed. Make sure you have your command line tools set up. You do this by doing Xcode -> Preferences -> Downloads and making sure you have Command Line Tools downloaded and installed.

Step 2: Prepare Cmake

I won't go into what Cmake is, but download and install the latest version. SFML needs it.

Step 3: Download SFML 2

Go to SFML's download page and download the SFML source code (either the SFML 2.0 source code or the latest snapshot of the Git repository).

Step 4: Open a Terminal

Hopefully you've got the Terminal sitting on your dock, but in case not it can be found under Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app.

Step 5: Get Ready to Build

Next, do the following in your terminal:

cd <sfml folder>
mkdir build
cd build

In the first line, replace <sfml folder> with the path to the folder where you downloaded and extracted the SFML source to. mkdir build just creates the directory build where we can do our dirty work, and cd build moves into that folder.

Step 6: Run Cmake

Now run the following (you can copy and paste):

cmake -G 'Unix Makefiles' \
      -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES='i386;x86_64' \
      -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER='/usr/bin/clang++' \
      -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER='/usr/bin/clang' \
      -DSFML_BUILD_FRAMEWORKS='ON' \
      -DSFML_INSTALL_XCODE4_TEMPLATES='ON' \
      -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS='-stdlib=libc++' \
      -DCMAKE_C_FLAGS='-stdlib=libc++' ../

This runs Cmake and tells it to do a few things. Particularly, it's saying (going down the options one by one):

• Use Makefiles instead of Xcode
• Build for x86 and x86_64 (i.e. 32-bit and 64-bit)
• Use clang++ for compiling the C++ code
• Use clang for compiling the C code
• Build as frameworks (instead of just dynamic libraries)
• Install the Xcode SFML templates (so you can easily create SFML projects)
• Link to the libc++ standard library implementation (necessary for C++11)

This doesn't actually build SFML, but it sets everything up so we can run the next two commands...

Step 7: Build!

Now run:

make -j4

make is a fancy program that will actually do all the building of SFML for you. The -j4 option just says "Use 4 threads to do this." If you don't want to use multiple threads to build (which is sloooow), you can omit this option. If you want to use more threads, like 8, you can change it to -j8 (I personally use 8 threads).

Step 8: Install!

The last step:

sudo make install

This will prompt you for your password. Give it your password. It'll place all the SFML files in their final resting place on your system, and it needs some elevated privileges to write the files to the necessary folders. If you're curious where it's writing the files to, just look at the output. Anyway, now you're done!

Bonus Step: Making an Xcode Project

What good is building and installing SFML if you don't use it? We'll set up a simple project now. Open Xcode. Then create a new project. Then select the SFML App template:

In the next screen, give your project a name. Make sure to say you want to use C++11! The "C++ Compiler and Standard Library" option does not default to Clang and C++11. You have to set this yourself. Assuming you followed my instructions and made SFML a universal framework for 32-bit and 64-bit, the rest of the options can stay the same.

You should now be able to run the created project!