OCaml Universal Installer

OCaml Universal Installer or oui is a command-line tool that produces standalone installers for your OCaml applications.

It can produce installers for Linux, Windows and macOS, installing pre-compiled binaries directly, no need to build anything on the target machine.

You won't need to teach your users how to install OCaml, Opam or any other tools that they don't need. Just download and run the installer and you're good to go.

Detailed documentation can be found here.

This project is built on top of opam-wix. The project's original documentation is still available here.

Installation

You can install the latest oui release via opam:

opam install oui

or the development version with:

opam pin oui https://github.com/OCamlPro/ocaml-universal-installer.git#master

oui does still require some opam libraries so you will need opam.2.4.0 or higher.

Platform specific dependencies

Producing installers for different platforms requires different extra tools. They do not need to be installed before oui but need to be available on the system when running it.

Linux

Our linux installers are built using makeself.

The result is a .run self-extracting archive that will decompress itself and execute an installation script before cleaning up.

To produce linux installer, the makeself script must be in the PATH. You can dowload the latest official release from the official makeself website.

We also use patchelf to set the RUNPATH on binaries, allowing oui or users themselves to embedded shared libraries.

Windows

Windows MSI are built using the Wix6 toolkit.

You can install Wix 6 from the GitHub releases page.

Usage

To assemble an installer for your current platform you need to provide:

• an installation bundle (a directory containing all binaries and files to install), usually produced by running dune build @install and dune install --relocatable --prefix <install-bundle-dir>.
• a JSON configuration file for oui, describing the important parts of the bundle and some project metadata. The format is fully documented here.

You can then run oui lint to check that the configuration and bundle are consistent.

Once this is good, you can run oui build oui.json <install-bundle-dir> to generate an installer.