bundle-dylibs

Command line tool to make standalone apps out of otherwise dependent apps on macOS, by packing the non-standard dynamic libraries into the application bundle.

Note

Since this tool modifies the app bundle, it is recommended to make a copy of the app bundle you want to process first, and run the tool on the copy. Even though testing has shown no issues so far, use this tool at your own risk!

Prerequisite

• Xcode Command Line Tools (CLT) must be installed before running this tool, since it uses commands from CLT.

About

This tool can be used to make a standalone, hence transferable -between different macOS systems- app out of otherwise dependent app. The dependency mentioned here comes from the extra dynamic libraries an app depends on, which are not present by default on macOS. eg. libgnutls. You can have such a situation when you build an app from source which depends on extra dynamic libraries, eg. the GNU Emacs.

Background

Prevoiusly I was using David Caldwell's Emacs For Mac OS X, which did provide me with a good service for a long time, but unfortunately, on newer macOS versions due to the enhanced security features, like app-based access control to folders like Desktop, Documents, etc. it become a bit confusing for the unaware user to grant access to ruby after a fresh install/update. That's because David's approach was to distribute a universal app, which comes with multiple binaries pre-built for different versions of macOS, and a ruby launcher script. This ruby launcher script is the culprit, why we need to grant access to the ruby interpreter and not the Emacs.app on recent macOS systems. With this, Emacs is also slower to launch compared to a pure binary. Don't get me wrong, it's great what David has had done. It's just that I personally don't need multiple binaries bundled, and a slower launching mechanism, and due to the fact it's really easy to build Emacs from source, this tool was born.

Example usage

Build GNU Emacs from source and make it a standalone app

brew install gnutls
brew install jansson
brew install xz

curl -O https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/emacs-28.1.tar.xz
tar xf emacs-28.1.tar.xz
cd emacs-28.1
./configure
make
make install

cp -R nextstep/Emacs.app ~/Applications/Emacs.app
bundle-dylibs ~/Applications/Emacs.app

This last one is for staging. After checking and positive testing, you can move the Emacs.app to /Applications and use it normally. Now it should be standalone and ready to be distributed to other macOS systems.

Inspired by

• https://github.com/renard/emacs-build-macosx/blob/master/build-emacs
• https://github.com/trojanfoe/xcodedevtools/blob/master/copy_dylibs.py