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Build System Requirements
Development of OBS Studio plugins has the same requirements as development of OBS Studio itself: A current version of the platform's preferred development platform and a current version of the platform itself are required.
| Platform | Tool |
|---|---|
| Windows | Visal Studio 17 2022 |
| macOS | XCode 16.0 |
| Windows, macOS | CMake 3.30.5 |
| Ubuntu 24.04 | CMake 3.28.3 |
| Ubuntu 24.04 | ninja-build |
| Ubuntu 24.04 | pkg-config |
| Ubuntu 24.04 | build-essential |
Development on Windows requires use of Visual Studio 17 2022 and the Windows Platform SDK version 10.0.22621. This also means that at least Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 are required for development. Refer to the official system requirements to check if your chosen platform is supported.
Visual Studio can be installed with built-in CMake support, which makes a separate installation of CMake optional on Windows. If a separate installation of CMake is desired, we suggest developers install the most recent official version of it.
Development on macOS requires use of Xcode 16, which itself requires at least macOS 14.5+ to run. Note that Xcode updates at the half-way point between macOS versions will usually drop support for the prior version of macOS, so using macOS 15 is highly suggested.
The easiest way to install CMake on macOS is to use Homebrew, which can also be used to install all other tools and utilities a developer might want to have available at their disposal. Follow the installation instructions on their website to set up Brew on your machine and then simply install CMake via brew install cmake. Homebrew by default only supports the most recent official release of software, which is also the suggested version to use.
Out of the box OBS Studio provides support for Ubuntu 24.04 and Flatpak. As such the plugin template also only provides documentation and support for these environments.
There are no barriers to compile, package, or distribute a plugin for other distributions, but due to the rich landscape of Linux distributions, they (and their at times differing requirements) cannot be documented here.
At the very least building a plugin on a Linux (or Linux-like) platform thus requires that the distribution provides CMake at version 3.28 or more recent. To support CMake in discovering required system packages, having the appropriate variant of pkg-config installed is also beneficial.
Linux developers can use any build system supported by CMake's build generator, though the most common variants are either Unix Makefiles or Ninja. Ensure that the desired build system is also installed on the build machine.
OBS Studio Developer Resources
Plugin Development | Frontend Development | Graphics Development