Application Engineer
Have a Question?

Contact us for device selection, troubleshooting & more!

Response time promise: 1 business day

Application Engineer
Have a Question?
Have a Question?

Packaging Zaber Motion Library with MATLAB Compiler

Source Code

By Colby Sparks

Published on Mar. 04, 2026

This example demonstrates how to build and run a standalone MATLAB application which uses the Zaber Motion Library toolbox. The source code for the application is in src/main.m.

MATLAB Compiler

MATLAB Compiler is a tool which allows users to package MATLAB code into standalone applications. During the build process, it will perform a dependency analysis of a project to determine exactly which files need to be included in the final packaged application, but binary dependencies such as *.mex files and shared libraries (*.dll/*.so/*.dylib) will not be included automatically.

The Zaber Motion Library toolbox includes some binary dependencies, namely a shared library and its corresponding thunk file, so the paths to these binary files must be specified manually.

Prerequisites

The user must have the MATLAB Compiler and Zaber Motion Library toolbox (version >=8.4.0) installed. Additionally, in order to run the matlab -batch command below, MATLAB must be added to the system PATH.

This code example has been tested with MATLAB R2026a.

Standalone Application

There are several different ways of configuring MATLAB Compiler to build a standalone application. In this example we use the compiler.build.standaloneApplication function with StandaloneApplicationOptions object. It is also possible to configure and build an application using the Standalone Application Compiler in the MATLAB IDE.

The build_standalone_app.m script contains all the logic for packaging the Zaber Motion Library toolbox with the program contained in src/main.m. The most important thing to note is the following line where we assign the return value from zaber.motion.Helper.getCompilerDependencies to the AdditionalFiles field of the build options object:

buildOpts.AdditionalFiles = zaber.motion.Helper.getCompilerDependencies();

Note: If you are using the Standalone Application Compiler in the MATLAB IDE, the files whose paths are returned from zaber.motion.Helper.getCompilerDependencies need to be added manually under "Files Required for Standalone to Run".

Building the Application

To build the standalone application, clone this repository with git (or download the project), then either:

  • Open the util_matlab_compiler directory in your MATLAB IDE and run build_standalone_app.
  • In the command line, navigate to the util_matlab_compiler directory and run matlab -batch build_standalone_app.

The script places the packaged application in the ZaberStandaloneApp/output/build folder.

Running the Application

Windows

To run the application in Windows, you can either locate the ZaberStandaloneApp.exe file directly in File Explorer or use the following command in PowerShell:

cd examples/util_matlab_compiler
.\ZaberStandaloneApp\output\build\ZaberStandaloneApp.exe

Linux / macOS

On Linux/macOS, MATLAB Compiler generates a shell script run_ZaberStandaloneApp.sh which requires the path to your MATLAB Runtime (or MATLAB installation) as the first argument:

cd examples/util_matlab_compiler
./ZaberStandaloneApp/output/build/run_ZaberStandaloneApp.sh <deployedMcrRoot>

Where <deployedMcrRoot> is the path to your MATLAB install.