Read First!

The below wiki article is based on user submitted content.
Please verify all hyperlinks and terminal commands below!

See a mistake? Want to contribute? Edit this article on Github

Building for macOS

Dependencies:

It’s recommended that you use homebrew to install dependencies. You’ll need to download and install the following to build Citra:

  • CMake (brew install cmake)

  • Python 3 (brew install python3)

    • The version included with the default developer tools may run into an issue downloading Qt.

  • A recent version of Xcode and the Xcode command line tools

Cloning Citra in Git:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/citra-emu/citra
cd citra

Using CMake:

Create a build folder and generate makefiles for the build:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES="x86_64;x86_64h" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

This builds a fat binary that has slices targeting early and late x64 machines.

Building Citra

make -j4

A citra-qt.app application bundle will now be present under build/bin/. Note that this is non-portable and only works on your machine. You can create distributable bundles as well by running make bundle and checking the output in build/bundle/.

About building on Apple Silicon machines

To build Citra targeting macOS on ARM, the process is largely the same. A few things to note are:

  • Make sure the Homebrew version you have installed is the ARM version
  • If you are cross-compiling, when running the cmake command you’ll want to use this command instead:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES="arm64" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release