Welcome to OCaml Batteries Included

OCaml Batteries Included, or just Batteries, is a community-maintained foundation library for your OCaml projects. Batteries

• defines a standard set of libraries which may be expected on every compliant installation of OCaml;

• organizes these libraries into a hierarchy of modules, with a single source of documentation; and

• provides a consistent API for otherwise independent libraries.

Building Batteries

Requirements

You will need the following libraries:

• OCaml >= 3.12.1
• Findlib >= 1.5.3
• GNU make
• OUnit to build and run the tests (optional)
• qtest >= 2.0.1 to build and run the tests (optional)
• ocaml-benchmark to build and run the performance tests (optional)

Configuration and Installation

To install the full version of Batteries, execute

$ make all
$ make test               [ optional ]
$ sudo make install

$ make doc                [ optional ]
$ sudo make install-doc   [ optional ]

If you want the documentation installed elsewhere, set this before starting the build process because this location is stored in the Batteries_config module generated during compilation.

$ export DOCROOT=/path/to/new/docroot/

To disable native compilation:

$ export BATTERIES_NATIVE=false

To disable building of native shared libraries:

$ export BATTERIES_NATIVE_SHLIB=false

Using Batteries

To get started using Batteries at the toplevel, copy the ocamlinit file to ~/.ocamlinit:

$ cp ocamlinit ~/.ocamlinit

If you already have findlib in your ~/.ocamlinit, you only need the last line in our ocamlinit to load batteries.

More usage help available on the batteries-included wiki.

ExtLib Compatibility

If your project currently uses ExtLib, most likely you can just change -package extlib to -package batteries and add open Extlib to the top of any extlib-using modules. Batteries' modules are all named BatFoo to differentiate them from extlib's modules, so one can use Batteries and ExtLib in the same project.

COMPATIBILITY NOTE: If you're using ExtLib's Unzip module, it does not have a corresponding module in batteries at the moment.

Extending Batteries

See the guidelines wiki page.

If you use emacs, the file batteries_dev.el has extra highlighting to support writing quicktests.