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Building Blender on macOS

Building Blender for macOS needs a bit of preparation. However the steps are not very complicated and if you follow the instructions carefully you should be able to build Blender.

macOS version 11.2 and newer is supported.

Quick Setup

Install Development Tools

Install either:

  • Xcode from the App Store, to get a full development environment.
  • Xcode command line tools by running this in the terminal. This takes up less disk space.
xcode-select --install

Install CMake and Git LFS

CMake and Git LFS must be installed and available to be used by Blender.

There are multiples ways to install them. We recommend using Homebrew. Follow the install instructions on the Homebrew website, then run in the terminal:

brew install cmake git git-lfs svn

Other package managers like MacPorts and Fink work as well. You may also install CMake and Git LFS manually. This is more advanced and requires ensuring cmake and git-lfs commands are in the PATH.

Download Sources and Libraries

Now you are ready to get the latest Blender source code from Blender.org's Git repository. Copy and paste the following instructions into a terminal window. These will create a blender-git folder off your home directory and download the latest source code, as well as add-ons and external libraries.

mkdir ~/blender-git
cd ~/blender-git
git clone https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender.git
cd blender
make update

Building

The easiest and fastest solution is to build Blender with the default settings, and simply run this in the Terminal:

cd ~/blender-git/blender
make

After the build finished, you will find Blender.app ready to run in ~/blender-git/build_darwin/bin.

Updating

If you later want to update to and build the latest version, run:

cd ~/blender-git/blender
make update
make

If building fails, it sometimes helps to remove the ~/blender-git/build_darwin folder to get a completely clean build.

Branches

With the quick setup instructions the main branch will be built by default, which contains the latest Blender version under development.

To build another branch or a pull request, first checkout the branch and then run make update to update the add-ons, libraries and tests to match.

cd ~/blender-git/blender
git checkout <branch-name>
make update
make

Depending on how big the changes are compared to the main branch, it may be necessary to remove the build folder ~/blender-git/build_darwin. Otherwise the build folder may still refer to libraries from another branch.

Xcode

See the Xcode development environment page for information on how to set up an Xcode project.

Cross Compiling

On a machine with Apple Silicon, by default a version optimized for that CPU architecture will be built. It is also possible to build an Intel version, as follows.

./build_files/utils/make_update.py --architecture x86_64
make BUILD_DIR=../build_x86_64 BUILD_CMAKE_ARGS="-DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES=x86_64"