I am developing a Cocoa Application using the latest version of Xcode 4, I want to link dynamic libraries to my project (dylibs
).
I read somewhere that adding the libraries in my project was not enough as I have to run install_name_tool
and otool
to make my project use the libraries that were bundled in my project.
I have read the manual pages for install_name_tool
, but I do not understand WHY I have to do this.
How do libraries work? Especially interested in the part where the application and the libraries have paths that point to specific places in my machine, like /usr/local/lib/mylibrary.dylib
when running otool -L
Apple has several ways of locating shared libraries:
@executable_path
: relative to the main executable@loader_path
: relative to the referring binary@rpath
: relative to any of a list of paths.@rpath
is the most recent addition, introduced in OS X 10.5.
If for instance you want to have your executable in Contents/MacOS
and libraries in Contents/Libraries
you could do the following:
install_name_tool -id @rpath/Libraries/lib_this.dylib builddir/lib_this.dylib
and in the top-level executable set rpath
with:
install_name_tool -add_rpath @loader_path/.. myexecutable
and:
install_name_tool -change builddir/lib_this.dylib @rpath/Libraries/lib_this.dylib myexecutable
Note: that the first path after -change
must match exactly what is currently in the binary.
If you get lost otool -l -v myexecutable
will tell you what load commands exactly are currently in the executable.
See man dyld
and man install_name_tool
for more information.