Building on macOS

Prerequisites first: Build prerequisites (CMake, translations). macOS does not ship a linkable OpenSSL: install it as described in the OpenSSL setup and pass -DOPENSSL_ROOT_DIR when configuring.

Build

The build is driven by CMake. The package-local target stages LAN-Messenger.app into the LMC_RELEASE_DIR directory (defaults to <build-dir>/release; use lmc/release for the packaging scripts):

cmake -S . -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DLMC_RELEASE_DIR="$PWD/lmc/release"
cmake --build build --config Release --target package-local --parallel

The lmcapp sources are linked into the app binary, so no helper library ships inside LAN-Messenger.app/Contents/MacOS and no install_name_tool post-processing is needed. The Qt image format plugins go to Contents/Plugins (see setLibraryPaths in main.cpp).

Installer (DMG)

For building the installer, first run the bash script stage-mac-app in the lmc/setup/mac folder. This copies the app bundle and runs macdeployqt on it to collect the Qt frameworks. The script finds macdeployqt through the QTDIR environment variable, so make sure it points at your Qt installation (the parent folder of the bin and lib folders). Then build the disk image with dmgbuild (pip install dmgbuild), which packs the bundle, the Applications symlink, the Finder window layout (icon positions, background picture, icon size 72) and the user license agreement, as declared in dmg-settings.py:

dmgbuild -s dmg-settings.py "LAN-Messenger" "../lmc_<version>_<arch>.dmg"

<arch> is x86_64 or arm64; remove a previous image first with rm -f "../lmc_<version>_<arch>.dmg" if you rebuild. The dmg file will have the name lmc_<version>_x86_64.dmg (Intel Macs, CI job build-macos) or lmc_<version>_arm64.dmg (Apple Silicon, CI job build-macos) and will be saved to the lmc/setup folder.

Note: on macOS, the option to start LAN Messenger on startup will not work. This is a platform dependent function and it has not been implemented.