Building OCaml - linux-on-ibm-z/docs GitHub Wiki

Building OCaml

Below versions of OCaml are available in respective distributions at the time of creation of these build instructions:

  • RHEL 8.10 has 4.07.0
  • RHEL (9.4, 9.6) have 4.11.1
  • RHEL 10.0 has 5.2.0
  • SLES 15 (SP6, SP7) have 4.14.2
  • Ubuntu 22.04 has 4.13.1
  • Ubuntu 24.04 has 4.14.1
  • Ubuntu 25.04 has 5.3.0

The instructions provided below specify the steps to build OCaml v5.4.0 on Linux on IBM Z for following distributions:

  • RHEL (8.10, 9.4, 9.6, 10.0)
  • SLES 15 (SP6, SP7)
  • Ubuntu (22.04, 24.04, 25.04)

General Notes:

  • When following the steps below please use a standard permission user unless otherwise specified.
  • A directory /<source_root>/ will be referred to in these instructions, this is a temporary writable directory anywhere you'd like to place it.

1. Install Dependencies

export SOURCE_ROOT=/<source_root>/

1.1. Ensure that GCC and GNU make are installed and up to date:

  • RHEL (8.10)

    sudo yum install -y gcc make git gawk sed diffutils

  • RHEL (9.4, 9.6, 10.0)

     sudo yum install -y gcc gcc-c++ make git gawk sed diffutils binutils hostname tar unzip cmake curl wget vim patch tcl gettext autoconf libtool automake bzip2 zlib zlib-devel bison

  • SLES 15 (SP6, SP7)

    sudo zypper install -y gcc make git-core gawk sed diffutils

  • Ubuntu (22.04, 24.04, 25.04)

    sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install gcc make git gawk sed diffutils

2. Build and Install

2.1. Download the OCaml source and navigate into the top-level directory:

cd $SOURCE_ROOT
git clone -b 5.4.0 https://github.com/ocaml/ocaml.git
cd ocaml

2.2. Configure the build by issuing this command:

./configure --enable-ocamltest

2.3. Build the bytecode, native-code and fast versions of OCaml compilers:

make

2.4. Install the OCaml system:

sudo make install

3. Run the test suites (Optional):

make tests

4. Validate installation (Optional):

ocaml --version

The output should be:

The OCaml toplevel, version 5.4.0

References: