Compiling for different platforms

Cross compiling with Go is designed to be simple - we just set the environment variable GOOS for the target Operating System (and GOARCH if targeting a different architecture). Unfortunately when using native graphics calls the use of CGo in Fyne makes this a little harder.

Compiling from a development computer

To cross-compile a Fyne application you will also have to set CGO_ENABLED=1 which tells go to enable the C compiler (this is normally turned off when the target platform is different to the current system). Doing so unfortunately means that you must have a C compiler for the target platform that you are going to compile for. After installing the appropriate compilers you will also need to set the CC environment variable to tell Go which compiler to use.

There are many ways to install the required tools - and different tools that can be used. The configuration recommended by the Fyne developers is:

GOOS (target) CC provider download notes
darwin o32-clang osxcross from github.com You will also need to install the macOS SDK (instructions at the download link)
windows x86_64-w64-mingw64-gcc mingw64 package manager For macOS use homebrew
linux gcc or x86_64-linux-musl-gcc gcc or musl-cross cygwin or package manager musl-cross is available from homebrew to provide the linux gcc. You will also need to install X11 and mesa headers for compilation.

With the environment variables above set you should be able to compile in the usual manner. If further errors occur it is likely to be due to missing packages. Some target platforms require additional libraries or headers to be installed for the compilation to succeed.

Using a virtual environment

As a Linux system is able to cross compile to macOS and Windows easily it can be simpler to use a virtualised environment when you are not developing from Linux. Docker images are a useful tool for a complex build configuration and this works for Fyne as well. There are different tools that can be used. The tool recommended by the Fyne developers is fyne-cross. It has been inspired by xgo and uses a docker image built on top of the golang-cross image, that includes the MinGW compiler for windows, and a macOS SDK, along with the Fyne requirements.

fyne-cross allows to build binaries and create distribution packages for the following targets:

GOOS GOARCH
darwin amd64
darwin 386
linux amd64
linux 386
linux arm64
linux arm
windows amd64
windows 386
android amd64
android 386
android arm64
android arm
ios  
freebsd amd64
freebsd arm64

Note: iOS compilation is supported only on darwin hosts.

Requirements

  • go >= 1.13
  • docker

Installation

You can install fyne-cross using the following command (requires Go 1.16 or later):

go install github.com/fyne-io/fyne-cross@latest

For earlier versions of Go, you need to use the following command instead:

go get github.com/fyne-io/fyne-cross

Usage

fyne-cross <command> [options]

The commands are:

	darwin        Build and package a fyne application for the darwin OS
	linux         Build and package a fyne application for the linux OS
	windows       Build and package a fyne application for the windows OS
	android       Build and package a fyne application for the android OS
	ios           Build and package a fyne application for the iOS OS
	freebsd       Build and package a fyne application for the freebsd OS
	version       Print the fyne-cross version information

Use "fyne-cross <command> -help" for more information about a command.

Wildcards

The arch flag support wildcards in case want to compile against all supported GOARCH for a specified GOOS

Example:

fyne-cross windows -arch=*

is equivalent to

fyne-cross windows -arch=amd64,386

Example

The example below cross compile and package the fyne examples application

git clone https://github.com/fyne-io/examples.git
cd examples
Compile and package the main example app
fyne-cross linux

Note: by default fyne-cross will compile the package into the current dir.

The command above is equivalent to: fyne-cross linux .

Compile and package a particular example app
fyne-cross linux -output bugs ./cmd/bugs