OLA Mac Install From Tarball

Install a Compiler

The easiest is to install Xcode . Xcode comes in two versions: XCode 4 which you need to pay for and XCode 3 which is free. XCode 3 works just fine.

You can use other compilers but that's outside the scope of this tutorial.

Install OLA Dependancies

The easiest way is to install the dependancies using MacPorts.

Once you have MacPorts installed, running the following command to download and build the dependancies.

sudo port install pkgconfig cppunit protobuf-cpp libmicrohttpd libusb py27-protobuf

You may need to change which py27-protobuf port you install based on the version of Python on your system. You can find that out by running

 python --version

On my system I get

 Python 2.7.1

So I install the py27-protobuf port. Remember which version you install because you'll need it in the next section.

You also need git installed, if you haven't got it already run

 sudo port install git-core

Set some environment variables

Set $PATH to point to something sane, and fix some other environment variables:

export PATH="$PATH:/usr/local/bin/"
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/local/lib/pkgconfig:$PKG_CONFIG_PATH"
export CPPFLAGS="-I/opt/local/include"
export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/local/lib"
export PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/:/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages

You may need to tweak the PYTHONPATH depending on where the python protobufs were installed. You can find that out by running:

 port contents py27-protobuf

Make sure the port name matches the one you installed in the step above.

Download OLA

Download the latest tarball from https://github.com/OpenLightingProject/ola/releases.

Extract the tarball:

 tar -zxf ola-0.X.Y.tar.gz
 cd ola-0.X.Y

Run autoreconf

If this is the first time run with -i to install the missing files

autoreconf -i

Do the usual build steps

You can pass additional options to ./configure . Run

 ./configure --help

to see all options. The most popular option is --enable-python-libs to build the Python Client Module. If you want to use the RDM responder tests add --enable-rdm-tests.

Once you've decided on the options, it's time to build OLA. If you have a multi-core machine, you can speed up the build by using make -j N. A good value of N is the number of cores on your machine. On a MacBook Pro (4 core) using -j 4 reduced the build time from 5 minutes to 2.5 minutes.

./configure --enable-rdm-tests
make
make check
sudo make install

Common Problems

See Common Problems When Building OLA on Mac