ocaml-env

opam.exe is intended to be used from within cygwin. If you want to install additional libraries or upgrade existing packages, you should do it inside a cygwin terminal (mintty/rxvt-unicode,…).

Once everything is installed, you are not longer depended on cygwin. You can build your project from cmd.exe, powershell, your editor, etc. However, you have to configure your build environment properly. Your c compiler/linker (msvc or mingw-w64), cygwin (used internally by mingw/flexlink), and ocaml/opam all require special changes to the environment (PATH, OCAMLLIB, CAML_LD_LIBRARY_PATH, LIBPATH, etc.).

ocaml-env is a little helper to combine these different steps into one single call.

Program Startup

Run a program with the proper environment settings, e.g:

:: run cmd.exe
ocaml-env exec -- cmd.exe
:: start utop from the 4.03.0-mingw64 switch
ocaml-env exec --switch=4.03.0-mingw64 -- utop.exe
:: run utop inside ConEmu / Notepad
ocaml-env-win --switch=4.04.0-msvc32 -- "C:\\Program Files\\ConEmu\\ConEmu.exe" -run utop.exe
ocaml-env-win -- "C:\\Program Files\\Notepad++\\notepad++.exe"

Note the difference between ‘ocaml-env.exe exec – ..’ and ‘ocaml-env-win.exe – ..’. Use the former to start console based applications, the latter to start GUI applications.

Msvc

ocaml-env is also useful, if you want to configure your environment for the msvc toolchain from within cygwin. E.g if you intend to use Visual Studio 2015 to compile OCaml:

eval $(ocaml-env cygwin --ms=vs2015 --no-opam --64)
opam switch 4.04+msvc64

The --no-opam switch is necessary, because 4.04+msvc64 is not yet installed and we don’t want to include opam environment settings from another switch. --64 is necessary in order to add the environment variables for the right architecture. You can omit both once your compiler is installed:

opam switch 4.04+msvc64
eval $(ocaml-env cygwin --ms=vs2015)

If you have only one Microsoft toolchain installed, you could in theory now also omit --ms=vs2015. But I’m not sure, if the auto-detection of program paths works very well. Open an issue, if you encounter any problem.

Mingw

If you use depext-cygwinports, ocaml-env will add /usr/i686-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin or /usr/x86_64-w64-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/bin to your PATH, eval $(ocaml-env cygwin) might be preferable to eval $(opam config env).

Further Info

See ocaml-env --help for further details.