Installing Drizzle from Source on OS X

Installing Drizzle on OS X 10.6 is pretty simple. We have a page on our wiki that has the basic steps, but I thought that I'd detail what I do on my Macs in the hope that it may make someone's life easier. Note that we don't build on any 10.5 machines, and I don't use that version anymore, so YMMV with these instructions. Also, these instructions assume that you have the Xcode package already installed. I have Xcode 4 installed, but these instructions should work with Xcode 3, too. If they don't, let me know.

I used to use MacPorts on my Macs to install the necessary libraries that are needed by Drizzle. I've recently dumped that because I didn't like all of the extra stuff that was installed (do you really need to install a separate Perl installation?). And a recent b0rk of their Perl installations was the final straw.

It turns out that all you really need are just a few extra packages to build Drizzle on your Mac. Here are the packages that I currently have installed on my machines:

• autoconf
• automake
• libtool
• pcre
• boost
• protobuf

The first three (autoconf, automake, and libtool) aren't strictly necessary. I install those because I want newer versions of those tools than what OS X provides by default. It makes building a little bit nicer (the output is much cleaner). The last three are what you really need.

Each package has its own instructions for how to compile and install. I use the default installation path (/usr/local) for each. Basically, building and installing for each is simply:

• ./configure
• make
• sudo make install

The Boost package is the lone exception:

• ./bootstrap.sh
• ./bjam
• sudo ./bjam install

If you install the libtool package, there is one additional step you should do. That package installs the binaries libtool and libtoolize into /usr/local/bin. I rename these to glibtool and glibtoolize, respectively. The Drizzle build system looks for these program names.

The last thing I do is to make sure that /usr/local/bin is in my path. So in $HOME/.bash_profile, I have this line:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

With all that in place, to build Drizzle is just:

• ./config/autorun.sh
• ./configure

No need to add any extra options to configure to find libraries.