Usage¶

This section describe usage of dune from the shell.

Finding the root¶

dune-workspace¶

The root of the current workspace is determined by looking up a dune-workspace or dune-project file in the current directory and parent directories.

dune prints out the root when starting if it is not the current directory:

$ dune runtest
Entering directory '/home/jdimino/code/dune'
...

More precisely, it will choose the outermost ancestor directory containing a dune-workspace file as root. For instance if you are in /home/me/code/myproject/src, then dune will look for all these files in order:

/dune-workspace
/home/dune-workspace
/home/me/dune-workspace
/home/me/code/dune-workspace
/home/me/code/myproject/dune-workspace
/home/me/code/myproject/src/dune-workspace

The first entry to match in this list will determine the root. In practice this means that if you nest your workspaces, dune will always use the outermost one.

In addition to determining the root, dune will read this file as to setup the configuration of the workspace unless the --workspace command line option is used. See the section Workspace configuration for the syntax of this file.

Current directory¶

If the previous rule doesn’t apply, i.e. no ancestor directory has a file named dune-workspace, then the current directory will be used as root.

Forcing the root (for scripts)¶

You can pass the --root option to dune to select the root explicitly. This option is intended for scripts to disable the automatic lookup.

Note that when using the --root option, targets given on the command line will be interpreted relative to the given root, not relative to the current directory as this is normally the case.

Interpretation of targets¶

This section describes how dune interprets the targets given on the command line. When no targets are specified, dune builds the default alias, see Default alias for more details.

Resolution¶

All targets that dune knows how to build live in the _build directory. Although, some are sometimes copied to the source tree for the need of external tools. These includes:

.merlin files
<package>.install files

As a result, if you want to ask dune to produce a particular .exe file you would have to type:

$ dune build _build/default/bin/prog.exe

However, for convenience when a target on the command line doesn’t start with _build, dune will expand it to the corresponding target in all the build contexts where it knows how to build it. When using --verbose, It prints out the actual set of targets when starting:

$ dune build bin/prog.exe --verbose
...
Actual targets:
- _build/default/bin/prog.exe
- _build/4.03.0/bin/prog.exe
- _build/4.04.0/bin/prog.exe

Aliases¶

Targets starting with a @ are interpreted as aliases. For instance @src/runtest means the alias runtest in all descendant of src in all build contexts where it is defined. If you want to refer to a target starting with a @, simply write: ./@foo.

To build and run the tests for a particular build context, use @_build/default/runtest instead.

So for instance:

dune build @_build/foo/runtest will run the tests only for the foo build context
dune build @runtest will run the tests for all build contexts

You can also build an alias non-recursively by using @@ instead of @. For instance to run tests only from the current directory:

dune build @@runtest

Default alias¶

When no targets are given to dune build, it builds the special default alias. Effectively dune build is equivalent to:

dune build @@default

When a directory doesn’t explicitly define what the default alias means via an alias stanza, the following implicit definition is assumed:

(alias
 (name default)
 (deps (alias_rec install)))

Which means that by default dune build will build everything that is installable.

Finding external libraries¶

When a library is not available in the workspace, dune will look it up in the installed world, and expect it to be already compiled.

It looks up external libraries using a specific list of search paths. A list of search paths is specific to a given build context and is determined as follow:

if the ocamlfind is present in the PATH of the context, use each line in the output of ocamlfind printconf path as a search path
otherwise, if opam is present in the PATH, use the outout of opam config var lib
otherwise, take the directory where ocamlc was found, and append ../lib to it. For instance if ocamlc is found in /usr/bin, use /usr/lib

Running tests¶

There are two ways to run tests:

dune build @runtest
dune runtest

The two commands are equivalent. They will run all the tests defined in the current directory and its children recursively. You can also run the tests in a specific sub-directory and its children by using:

dune build @foo/bar/runtest
dune runtest foo/bar

Launching the Toplevel (REPL)¶

Dune supports launching a utop instance with locally defined libraries loaded.

$ dune utop <dir> -- <args>

Where <dir> is a directory containing a dune file defining all the libraries that will be loaded (using the library stanza). <args> will be passed as arguments to the utop command itself. For example, dune utop lib -- -implicit-bindings will start utop with the libraries defined in lib and implicit bindings for toplevel expressions.

Requirements & Limitations¶

utop version >= 2.0 is required for this to work.
This subcommand only supports loading libraries. Executables aren’t supported.
Libraries that are dependencies of utop itself cannot be loaded. For example Camomile.
Loading libraries that are defined in different directories into one utop instance isn’t possible.

Restricting the set of packages¶

You can restrict the set of packages from your workspace that dune can see with the --only-packages option:

$ dune build --only-packages pkg1,pkg2,... @install

This option acts as if you went through all the dune files and commented out the stanzas refering to a package that is not in the list given to dune.

Invocation from opam¶

You should set the build: field of your <package>.opam file as follows:

build: [["dune" "build" "-p" name "-j" jobs]]

-p pkg is a shorthand for --root . --only-packages pkg --profile release --default-target @install. -p is the short version of --for-release-of-packages.

This has the following effects:

it tells dune to build everything that is installable and to ignore packages other than name defined in your project
it sets the root to prevent dune from looking it up
it sets the build profile to release
it uses whatever concurrency option opam provides
it sets the default target to @install rather than @@default

Note that name and jobs are variables expanded by opam. name expands to the package name and jobs to the number of jobs available to build the package.

Tests¶

To setup the building and running of tests in opam, add this line to your <package>.opam file:

build-test: [["dune" "runtest" "-p" name "-j" jobs]]

Installation¶

Installing a package means copying the build artifacts from the build directory to the installed word.

When installing via opam, you don’t need to worry about this step: dune generates a <package>.install file that opam will automatically read to handle installation.

However, when not using opam or doing local development, you can use dune to install the artifacts by hands. To do that, use the install command:

$ dune install [PACKAGE]...

without an argument, it will install all the packages available in the workspace. With a specific list of packages, it will only install these packages. If several build contexts are configured, the installation will be performed for all of them.

Note that dune install is a thin wrapper around the opam-installer tool, so you will need to install this tool in order to be able to use dune install.

Destination¶

The place where the build artifacts are copied, usually referred as prefix, is determined as follow for a given build context:

if an explicit --prefix <path> argument is passed, use this path
if opam is present in the PATH and is configured, use the output of opam config var prefix
otherwise, take the parent of the directory where ocamlc was found.

As an exception to this rule, library files might be copied to a different location. The reason for this is that they often need to be copied to a particular location for the various build system used in OCaml projects to find them and this location might be different from <prefix>/lib on some systems.

Historically, the location where to store OCaml library files was configured through findlib and the ocamlfind command line tool was used to both install these files and locate them. Many Linux distributions or other packaging systems are using this mechanism to setup where OCaml library files should be copied.

As a result, if none of --libdir and --prefix is passed to dune install and ocamlfind is present in the PATH, then library files will be copied to the directory reported by ocamlfind printconf destdir. This ensures that dune install can be used without opam. When using opam, ocamlfind is configured to point to the opam directory, so this rule makes no difference.

Note that --prefix and --libdir are only supported if a single build context is in use.

Workspace configuration¶

By default, a workspace has only one build context named default which correspond to the environment in which dune is run. You can define more contexts by writing a dune-workspace file.

You can point dune to an explicit dune-workspace file with the --workspace option. For instance it is good practice to write a dune-workspace.dev in your project with all the version of OCaml your projects support. This way developers can tests that the code builds with all version of OCaml by simply running:

$ dune build --workspace dune-workspace.dev @install @runtest

dune-workspace¶

The dune-workspace file uses the S-expression syntax. This is what a typical dune-workspace file looks like:

(lang dune 1.0)
(context (opam (switch 4.02.3)))
(context (opam (switch 4.03.0)))
(context (opam (switch 4.04.0)))

The rest of this section describe the stanzas available.

Note that an empty dune-workspace file is interpreted the same as one containing exactly:

(lang dune 1.0)
(context default)

This allows you to use an empty dune-workspace file to mark the root of your project.

profile¶

The build profile can be selected in the dune-workspace file by write a (profile ...) stanza. For instance:

(profile release)

Note that the command line option --profile has precedence over this stanza.

context¶

The (context ...) stanza declares a build context. The argument can be either default or (default) for the default build context or can be the description of an opam switch, as follows:

(context (opam (switch <opam-switch-name>)
               <optional-fields>))

<optional-fields> are:

(name <name>) is the name of the subdirectory of _build where the artifacts for this build context will be stored
(root <opam-root>) is the opam root. By default it will take the opam root defined by the environment in which dune is run which is usually ~/.opam
(merlin) instructs dune to use this build context for merlin
(profile <profile>) to set a different profile for a build context. This has precedence over the command line option --profile

Both (default ...) and (opam ...) accept a targets field in order to setup cross compilation. See Cross Compilation for more information.

Merlin reads compilation artifacts and it can only read the compilation artifacts of a single context. Usually, you should use the artifacts from the default context, and if you have the (context default) stanza in your dune-workspace file, that is the one dune will use.

For rare cases where this is not what you want, you can force dune to use a different build contexts for merlin by adding the field (merlin) to this context.

Building JavaScript with js_of_ocaml¶

Dune knows how to generate a JavaScript version of an executable (<name>.bc.js) using the js_of_ocaml compiler (the js_of_ocaml-compiler opam package must be installed).

It supports two modes of compilation:

Direct compilation of a bytecode program to JavaScript. This mode allows js_of_ocaml to perform whole program deadcode elimination and whole program inlining.
Separate compilation, where compilation units are compiled to JavaScript separately and then linked together. This mode is useful during development as it builds more quickly.

The separate compilation mode will be selected when the build profile is dev, which is the default. There is currently no other way to control this behaviour.

See the section about js_of_ocaml for passing custom flags to the js_of_ocaml compiler

Distributing Projects¶

Dune provides support for building and installing your project. However it doesn’t provide helpers for distributing it. It is recommended to use dune-release for this purpose.

The common defaults are that your projects include the following files:

README.md
CHANGES.md
LICENSE.md

And that if your project contains several packages, then all the package names must be prefixed by the shortest one.

Watermarking¶

One of the feature dune-release provides is watermarking; it replaces various strings of the form %%ID%% in all files of your project before creating a release tarball or when the package is pinned by the user using opam.

This is especially interesting for the VERSION watermark, which gets replaced by the version obtained from the vcs. For instance if you are using git, dune-release invokes this command to find out the version:

$ git describe --always --dirty
1.0+beta9-79-g29e9b37

Projects using dune usually only need dune-release for creating and publishing releases. However they might still want to substitute the watermarks when the package is pinned by the user. To help with this, dune provides the subst sub-command.

dune subst¶

dune subst performs the same substitution dune-release does with the default configuration. i.e. calling dune subst at the root of your project will rewrite in place all the files in your project.

More precisely, it replaces all the following watermarks in source files:

NAME, the name of the project
VERSION, output of git describe --always --dirty
VERSION_NUM, same as VERSION but with a potential leading v or V dropped
VCS_COMMIT_ID, commit hash from the vcs
PKG_MAINTAINER, contents of the maintainer field from the opam file
PKG_AUTHORS, contents of the authors field from the opam file
PKG_HOMEPAGE, contents of the homepage field from the opam file
PKG_ISSUES, contents of the issues field from the opam file
PKG_DOC, contents of the doc field from the opam file
PKG_LICENSE, contents of the license field from the opam file
PKG_REPO, contents of the repo field from the opam file

The name of the project is obtained by reading the dune-project file in the directory where dune subst is called. The dune-project file must exist and contain a valid (name ...) field.

Note that dune subst is meant to be called from the opam file and in particular behaves a bit different to other dune commands. In particular it doesn’t try to detect the root of the workspace and must be called from the root of the project.

Custom Build Directory¶

By default dune places all build artifacts in the _build directory relative to the user’s workspace. However, one can customize this directory by using the --build-dir flag or the DUNE_BUILD_DIR environment variable.

$ dune build --build-dir _build-foo

# this is equivalent to:
$ DUNE_BUILD_DIR=_build-foo dune build

# Absolute paths are also allowed
$ dune build --build-dir /tmp/build foo.exe