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How to Build ClickHouse on Linux for macOS

This is for the case when you have a Linux machine and want to use it to build clickhouse binary that will run on OS X. This is intended for continuous integration checks that run on Linux servers. If you want to build ClickHouse directly on macOS, then proceed with another instruction.

The cross-build for macOS is based on the Build instructions, follow them first.

The following sections provide a walk-through for building ClickHouse for x86_64 macOS. If you’re targeting ARM architecture, simply substitute all occurrences of x86_64 with aarch64. For example, replace x86_64-apple-darwin with aarch64-apple-darwin throughout the steps.

Install clang-19​

Follow the instructions from https://apt.llvm.org/ for your Ubuntu or Debian setup. For example the commands for Bionic are like:

sudo echo "deb [trusted=yes] http://apt.llvm.org/bionic/ llvm-toolchain-bionic-17 main" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-get install clang-19

Install Cross-Compilation Toolset​

Let’s remember the path where we install cctools as ${CCTOOLS}

mkdir ~/cctools
export CCTOOLS=$(cd ~/cctools && pwd)
cd ${CCTOOLS}

git clone https://github.com/tpoechtrager/apple-libtapi.git
cd apple-libtapi
git checkout 15dfc2a8c9a2a89d06ff227560a69f5265b692f9
INSTALLPREFIX=${CCTOOLS} ./build.sh
./install.sh
cd ..

git clone https://github.com/tpoechtrager/cctools-port.git
cd cctools-port/cctools
git checkout 2a3e1c2a6ff54a30f898b70cfb9ba1692a55fad7
./configure --prefix=$(readlink -f ${CCTOOLS}) --with-libtapi=$(readlink -f ${CCTOOLS}) --target=x86_64-apple-darwin
make install

Also, we need to download macOS X SDK into the working tree.

cd ClickHouse/cmake/toolchain/darwin-x86_64
curl -L 'https://github.com/phracker/MacOSX-SDKs/releases/download/11.3/MacOSX11.0.sdk.tar.xz' | tar xJ --strip-components=1

Build ClickHouse​

cd ClickHouse
mkdir build-darwin
cd build-darwin
CC=clang-19 CXX=clang++-19 cmake -DCMAKE_AR:FILEPATH=${CCTOOLS}/bin/x86_64-apple-darwin-ar -DCMAKE_INSTALL_NAME_TOOL=${CCTOOLS}/bin/x86_64-apple-darwin-install_name_tool -DCMAKE_RANLIB:FILEPATH=${CCTOOLS}/bin/x86_64-apple-darwin-ranlib -DLINKER_NAME=${CCTOOLS}/bin/x86_64-apple-darwin-ld -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=cmake/darwin/toolchain-x86_64.cmake ..
ninja

The resulting binary will have a Mach-O executable format and can’t be run on Linux.