Building Aseprite from Source on MacOS Catalina 10.15

4 min readApr 6, 2021

Aseprite lets you create 2D animations for videogames. From sprites, to pixel-art, retro style graphics, and whatever you like about the 8-bit and 16-bit era.

Aseprite started as an open source software around 2001, and continued with the General Public License (GPLv2) until August 2016. Post which the General Public License (GPLv2) was replaced with the new Aseprite EULA.

As per the new license one can still download its source code, compile it, and use the program to create your assets for commercial games. But, the only restriction is that you cannot redistribute compiled versions of Aseprite. To help support the project, users now have to pay a minimum of $19.99 USD to obtain convenient .exe or .dmg installer files.

There is a GPL fork of Aseprite, free to compile and redistribute

LibreSprite/LibreSprite

LibreSprite is a free and open source program for creating and animating your sprites. Real-time animation previews…

github.com

but MacOS builds are currently not available

In this post I will describe the various steps I followed to build Aseprite from source on MacOS Catalina 10.15, along with the issues I encountered (and how I resolved them).

I used haxpor/aseprite-macos-buildsh utility to create latest release app of Aseprite for macOS.

haxpor/aseprite-macos-buildsh

Automated script to create latest release (whatever it will be either development snapshot commit, beta, or release) of…

github.com

Install

XCode via App Store
Homebrew via https://brew.sh
CMake & ninja

$ brew install ninja$ brew install cmake

Now all we need to do is clone the repo, enter it and modify the following line in aseprite.sh

POSTFIXPATH_SDKROOT=Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.15.sdk

POSTFIXPATH_SDKROOT=Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX.sdk

which can be verified by viewing the contents of Xcode at the given path:

/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Platforms/MacOSX.platform/Developer/SDKs

Now execute the script:

$ git clone https://github.com/haxpor/aseprite-macos-buildsh.git
$ cd aseprite-macos-buildsh
$ bash aseprite.sh

Issue #1

Received the following error message on first run:

CMake Error at third_party/curl/CMake/OtherTests.cmake:89 (message):
  Unable to link function recv
Call Stack (most recent call first):
  third_party/curl/CMakeLists.txt:792 (include)-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!

Someone reported similar issue in the official forum

Compile on MacOs Catalina does not go past the Cmake stage

Hello everyone. I was trying to install and compile aseprite on mi MacBookPro with macOs Catalina 10.15.6. I installed…

community.aseprite.org

and the suggested solution was to build curl beforehand and use it

So I did a fresh installation of curl using brew:

brew install curl

Once the installation was over, the following message was displayed:

If you need to have curl first in your PATH, run:
  echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/opt/curl/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrcFor compilers to find curl you may need to set:
  export LDFLAGS="-L/usr/local/opt/curl/lib"
  export CPPFLAGS="-I/usr/local/opt/curl/include"

Run the command to add curl to the PATH and modify the aseprite.sh script to include the USE_SHARED_CURL and CURL_INCLUDE_DIR cmake flags. Use the above CPPFLAGS directory as the CURL_INCLUDE_DIR

Issue #2

After making the above modifications and running the script, I received the following error message:

CMake Error at third_party/libarchive/CMakeLists.txt:1641 (MESSAGE):
  pid_t doesn't exist on this platform?-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!

Similar issue was raised in a forum and the solution was strangely as suggested, I cleared out the contents of /aseprite/build/ folder and executed the build again.

Issue #3

The compilation was successful in the third attempt, but the build failed with the following error message:

[1416/1416] Linking CXX executable bin/aseprite
FAILED: bin/aseprite 
...
ld: library not found for -lSKSHAPER_LIBRARY-NOTFOUND
clang: error: linker command failed with exit code 1 (use -v to see invocation)
ninja: build stopped: subcommand failed.
Something went wrong

Again, the issue was encountered by multiple users as reported in the following thread: Link

I followed the solution option #2 wherein I downloaded pre-built skia library, extracted it and copied the libskshaper.a file.

Upon executing the build, finally it worked like a charm

Copying template .app to target location
All done

It was an emotional moment to witness the Asperite application icon in launchpad.

Success!