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)
  • glslang (brew install glslang)
  • 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 ..

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 from an x86_64 machine for ARM, when running the cmake command you’ll want to use this command instead:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES="arm64"
  • Similarly, if you are cross-compiling from an ARM machine for x86_64, you’ll want to use this command:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES="x86_64"