Building Apple Silicon (arm64 or universal) builds on Intel-based Mac

[ye0jun]

• Version: latest

• Electron Version: 11.0.4 or 11.3.0
• Electron Type (current, beta, nightly): current

• Target: mac-silicon

Can build for mac-arm64 on an intel mac?

[mmaietta]

Yes. Please search for previous issues first in the future.

There's CLI approach using --arm64 or for full universal use --universal

For build config, there is:

mac: {
  target: {
    target: 'default',
    arch: [
      'x64',
      'arm64'
    ]
  },
}

For universal builds, you can use: "arch": "universal" instead.

[yeefun]

It works:

"mac": {
  "target": [
    {
      "target": "default",
      "arch": [
        "x64",
        "arm64"
      ]
    }
  ],
}

If you want to auto update your Electron APP, you also need to upgrade electron-updater to 4.5.2 and electron-builder to 22.14.2 because this bug #6212.

[Nantris]

How does this work with native modules that need to support multiple architectures? Enabling npmRebuild: true in the config causes the error:

`Installation error: 'darwin-x64' binaries cannot be used on 'darwin-arm64v8' platform.

The prebuilt files exist for both architectures, but it doesn't seem like it works to rebuild as intended. If we skip the rebuild, then the app just quits unexpectedly when run after packaging.

The actual error appears to match this issue: #4122

[mmaietta]

I think npmRebuild is true by default.
Do you need one of these two config vars?
nodeGypRebuild: true or buildDependenciesFromSource: true

[Nantris]

This is my bad, and sorry for wasting time. Apparently there was some discrepancy in the dependency's docs about which version started supporting arm64 prebuilts, and we were not on a late enough version.

[AxelTerizaki]

Hello.

I figured I'd post here instead of making a new issue. I'm trying to build my app as an universal package on macOS, but run into an issue with packaging external binaries. Our app relies on ffmpeg (and a few other things) and we include an ffmpeg binary with our app.

I don't know how to build universal binaries for ffmpeg or others (I don't even know if it's possible) so I decided to get one for arm64 and one for x64 and named them accordingly. My app refers to either depending on process.arch. So far, so good.

However, when trying to use electron-builder, I see it starts with trying to build for both archs and merge them. But there's a lipo error like this :

/bin/lipo: /private/var/folders/r_/7xbh80yd7y1fzy34lyrbhmbm0000gp/T/electron-universal-XLGvi7/Tmp.app/Contents/app/bin/ffmpeg-arm64 and /Users/karaokemugen/dev/karaokemugen-app/packages/mac-universal--arm64/Karaoke Mugen.app/Contents/app/bin/ffmpeg-arm64 have the same architectures (arm64) and can't be in the same fat output file

As I understand it, that's because it took my bin foledr for each build and can't merge them because it already has the arm64 version of ffmpeg in the other one.

Is there a way for me to tell electron-builder that binaries for an arch are in one folder and in another for the other arch?

Or am I doing this wrong?

Thanks in advance for your help.

[AxelTerizaki]

Okay, my bad, I didn't search for the right words and found some similar issues (like #5552). I'll look into these more.

[owilliams320]

Just leaving this for those that are configuring this with YAML. i couldnt find an example anywhere

mac:
  target:
    - target: 'default'
      arch:
        - x64
        - arm64