Installation¶

CodeCAD is developed and tested primarily on macOS and Linux.

Info

Windows support is not yet available — if you want to help porting CodeCAD to Windows, contributions are welcome!

Requirements¶

Before building CodeCAD, make sure you have the following installed:

A modern C++ compiler with C++17 support (e.g. clang++ ≥ 12, g++ ≥ 9)
CMake ≥ 3.28
OpenCASCADE 7.9.1 (provides the geometric modeling kernel)
Standard development libraries

Installing OpenCASCADE¶

OpenCASCADE forms the core of CodeCAD’s kernel. You need to install it together with some development dependencies.

Linux (Ubuntu/Debian)¶

Install via APT:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y \
    build-essential cmake git \
    liblua5.4-dev \
    xorg-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev \
    libtbb-dev libtbb12 \
    libocct-data-exchange-dev \
    libocct-foundation-dev \
    libocct-modeling-algorithms-dev \
    libocct-modeling-data-dev

Tip: On other Linux distributions (Fedora, Arch, ...) the package names may differ. Refer to your distribution’s package manager and look for opencascade or occt packages.

macOS (Homebrew)¶

Install via Homebrew:

brew update
brew install cmake opencascade

Note: CodeCAD is regularly tested on macOS with OCCT 7.9.1 via Homebrew. If you have an older OCCT version, compilation may fail.

Build¶

Clone the repository and build:

git clone https://github.com/breiting/codecad
cd codecad
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)   # On macOS: use `make -j$(sysctl -n hw.ncpu)`
sudo make install

First CMake run

The first run of cmake may take longer because external dependencies are downloaded and configured. Subsequent runs will be faster.

Post-installation¶

After make install, ensure the target bin directory is available in your $PATH. You can check with:

ccad --help

If the installation was successful, you should see the CodeCAD CLI help. 🎉 You are now ready getting started.