libghostty-build

CI that builds Ghostty's embedding library from a pinned, unmodified upstream commit and publishes it as a release asset. Upstream Ghostty's releases carry only the app and ghostty-vt, not the macOS GhosttyKit.xcframework an app needs to embed Ghostty's terminal surfaces. The repo ships no library source of its own; the deliverable is the release.

What it produces

Each Ghostty pin publishes one release tagged ghostty-<short-sha>; the current pin's release is GitHub's "latest", and a test build of another ref is a prerelease. Each carries three assets, zipped, each with a .sha256 and a build-provenance attestation:

• GhosttyKit.xcframework.zip — the universal (arm64 + x86_64) macOS GhosttyKit.xcframework (slice macos-arm64_x86_64): terminal surfaces, the ghostty_surface_* C API, the NSView host.
• GhosttyResources.zip — libghostty's runtime resources: terminfo/ (tic-compiled) plus ghostty/shell-integration/, laid out to unpack straight into an app's Contents/Resources.
• libghostty-vt-macos.zip — libghostty-vt, Ghostty's standalone VT library: a universal lib/libghostty-vt.a plus include/ghostty/vt.h and vt/.

Embedders must ship the resources. Without Contents/Resources/terminfo/78/xterm-ghostty, libghostty sets TERM=xterm-256color instead of xterm-ghostty (logging "ghostty terminfo not found, using xterm-256color"), and programs in the terminal lose synchronized output (DEC 2026), styled/coloured underlines, and shell integration — tmux then shows half-drawn frames and a flickering cursor in unfocused panes.

Use

gh release download --repo lockyc/libghostty-build --pattern '*.zip' --pattern '*.sha256'
shasum -a 256 -c *.sha256
gh attestation verify GhosttyKit.xcframework.zip --repo lockyc/libghostty-build

Pass a tag (gh release download ghostty-<short-sha> …) to pin one build instead of the latest. warden consumes all three with just revendor-ghostty, which checks each .sha256 and records the Ghostty ref in its vendor/PROVENANCE.md.

How the build works

GHOSTTY_REF, a one-line file at the repo root, names the Ghostty tag or SHA to build. .github/workflows/build.yml (run by hand, on macos-15, with the Zig version Ghostty's build.zig.zon requires at that SHA):

1. resolves the ref to a SHA and clones unmodified Ghostty at it;
2. runs Ghostty's own xcframework build (-Demit-xcframework), unpatched, and repackages the universal macOS library as a macOS-only xcframework with the archive named libghostty.a (the compiled library is unchanged);
3. collects the runtime resources from zig-out/share;
4. builds libghostty-vt (-Demit-lib-vt) for aarch64 and x86_64 and lipos them into one universal library;
5. zips, checksums, attests and publishes the release.

To move the pin, edit GHOSTTY_REF, commit, and run the workflow. A weekly workflow opens a ghostty-update issue when Ghostty tags a new stable release. Test builds, rebuilding one asset, and the rest of the maintainer runbook: CLAUDE.md.

License

The build scripts and workflow here are MIT (LICENSE). The published assets contain compiled Ghostty and its runtime resources, MIT-licensed by upstream; its notice travels with the binary (LICENSE-ghostty). This repo redistributes those files under that license.