GoKawiilOCaml Onboarding: Introduction to the Dune build system
Welcome to all Camleers
We are back with another practical walkthrough for the newcomers of the OCaml ecosystem. We understand from the feedback we have gathered over the years that getting started with the OCaml Distribution can sometimes be perceived as challenging at first. That's why we keep it in mind when planning each post - to make your onboarding smoother and more approachable.
Case in point: today's topic, which came to us during the making of our latest opam deep-dive : Opam 103: Bootstrapping a New OCaml Project with opam.
It occured to us that we were assuming a level of familiarity with the toolchain that we had never explicitly explained or clarified. We decided to put together a short, practical guide for the newer developers, looking for quick, on-the-fly tutorials for OCaml. 🛠️
If you're new to OCaml, or any other programming language for that matter, the first necessities you'll encounter are building, running, and testing your code. Fortunately, there is a powerful build system called dune that we can use. It is widespread and makes project setup and compilation straightforward. Understanding how dune works is a key step towards becoming productive in the OCaml ecosystem.
In this article, we’ll walk you through the essentials of using dune to build libraries, executables, and tests, and to manage your project structure. Whether you're writing your first OCaml program or stepping into a new dune-based codebase, this guide will help you get up and running quickly.
We strongly believe that starting from scratch is key when approaching a brand new technical topic — and today's topic is no exception. Anyone who has ever felt lost exploring a new codebase knows that minimal, toy examples are often the best way to build intuition.
As said previously, this article was written in the context of the latest Opam 103: Bootstrapping a New OCaml Project with opam. That article explained how an OCaml developer should go about structuring an OCaml project when they intend to use it with opam .
The point of today's topic is to focus on the other defining parameter of the structure of an OCaml project: your build system. The goal is to show how the workflows of opam and dune fit together, while giving you a solid introduction to the fundamentals of dune.
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