Setup OCaml with Dune in Under a Minute

The Dune Developer Preview is an ongoing program that provides early access to new and experimental features in Dune and the broader OCaml Platform. It's not limited to a single feature or time period – instead, it's a continuous initiative to involve the community in testing and refining upcoming developments.

While it currently showcases Dune's new package management capabilities, the Developer Preview will continue to introduce and iterate on various features even after the package management system is fully integrated into stable releases.

By participating in the Developer Preview, you'll have the opportunity to try out cutting-edge functionality, provide valuable feedback, and help shape the future of Dune and the OCaml ecosystem. We encourage users to think of the Developer Preview as a persistent "beta channel" for Dune and related tools, always offering a glimpse into what's coming next.

Yes. The only difference from a regular build from source is in a few configuration flags. Please look in the Dune repository for complete instructions on how to do a source build of Dune.

When configuring the build you'll want to enable the following flags:

--pkg-build-progress enable
--lock-dev-tool enable
--portable-lock-dir enable

Yes, but we can't guarantee they will work correctly since the Dune Developer Preview makes some assumptions for package management that aren't supported by opam.

To enable these features make sure you are pinning dune to the development version, and export the following environment variables:

$ opam pin add dune --dev
$ export DUNE_CONFIG__PKG_BUILD_PROGRESS=enabled
$ export DUNE_CONFIG__LOCK_DEV_TOOL=enabled
$ export DUNE_CONFIG__PORTABLE_LOCK_DIRS=enabled