MacOS Deployment
The macdeployqtplus script should not be run manually. Instead, after building as usual:
make deploy
When complete, it will have produced Bitcoin-Core.zip.
SDK Extraction
Step 1: Obtaining Xcode.app
A free Apple Developer Account is required to proceed.
Our macOS SDK can be extracted from Xcode_26.1.1_Apple_silicon.xip.
Alternatively, after logging in to your account go to 'Downloads', then 'More'
and search for Xcode 26.1.1.
An Apple ID and cookies enabled for the hostname are needed to download this.
The sha256sum of the downloaded XIP archive should be f4c65b01e2807372b61553c71036dbfef492d7c79d4c380a5afb61aa1018e555.
To extract the .xip on Linux:
# Install/clone tools needed for extracting Xcode.app
apt install cpio
git clone https://github.com/bitcoin-core/apple-sdk-tools.git
# Unpack the .xip and place the resulting Xcode.app in your current
# working directory
python3 apple-sdk-tools/extract_xcode.py -f Xcode_26.1.1_Apple_silicon.xip | cpio -d -i
On macOS:
xip -x Xcode_26.1.1_Apple_silicon.xip
Step 2: Generating the SDK tarball from Xcode.app
To generate the SDK, run the script gen-sdk.py with the
path to Xcode.app (extracted in the previous stage) as the first argument.
./contrib/macdeploy/gen-sdk.py '/path/to/Xcode.app'
The generated archive should be: Xcode-26.1.1-17B100-extracted-SDK-with-libcxx-headers.tar.
The sha256sum should be 9600fa93644df674ee916b5e2c8a6ba8dacf631996a65dc922d003b98b5ea3b1.
Deterministic macOS App Notes
macOS Applications are created on Linux using a recent LLVM.
All builds must target an Apple SDK. These SDKs are free to download, but not redistributable. See the SDK Extraction notes above for how to obtain it.
The Guix build process has been designed to avoid including the SDK's files in Guix's outputs. All interim tarballs are fully deterministic and may be freely redistributed.
Using an Apple-blessed key to sign binaries is a requirement to produce (distributable) macOS binaries. Because this private key cannot be shared, we'll have to be a bit creative in order for the build process to remain somewhat deterministic. Here's how it works:
- Builders use Guix to create an unsigned release. This outputs an unsigned ZIP which users may choose to bless, self-codesign, and run. It also outputs an unsigned app structure in the form of a tarball.
- The Apple keyholder uses this unsigned app to create a detached signature, using the included script. Detached signatures are available from this repository.
- Builders feed the unsigned app + detached signature back into Guix, which combines the pieces into a deterministic ZIP.