Building librets on Mac OSX
September 1, 2007
I’ve used librets with Ruby on WinXP for a while now, but now I need it on my new Mac to try out some new ideas with RETS. Clearly, I’m a Mac “noob”, but boy – was this freakin’ hard! I’ve documented it here for future reference. Hopefully it will help someone else out.
Download librets
- Download librets-1.1.9.tar.gz from CRT.
- According to /doc/build/mac-osx.txt and unix.txt, it looks like there’s a lot of dependencies to install and build, which I’m not too comfortable doing manually.
- There’s a note that that the OpenDarwin package manager can install these for you, and I remembered reading about MacPorts earlier, so that seems worth installing.
Install MacPorts
- Download and install MacPorts from http://www.macports.org/
- Make sure path is correct according to installation instructions.
- Update MacPorts using “sudo port selfupdate”.
Install dependencies
- Install Boost using “sudo port install boost”. Takes a while – about 15 minutes for me.
- Install Expat using “sudo port install expat”
- Install ANTLR using “sudo port install antlr”
- Install libcurl using “sudo port install curl”
- Install swig using “sudo port install swig”. This was not documented as a dependency, so it took a while to figure this one out after the below steps kept failing.
Build librets
- “./configure” kept returning errors finding Expat and Boost files.
- Used “./configure –with-expat-prefix=/opt/local –with-boost-prefix=/opt/local –enable-shared_dependencies” instead.
- “make”
- “sudo make install”
Build librets ruby
- In the project/swig folder, use “make ruby”
Test
- In the project/swig/ruby folder, run “ruby login.rb” and “ruby search.rb”
You’ll know now if you’ve got everything dialed in. Note that when you are writing your own Ruby code in a different folder, make sure you include the path to librets.rb at the top like this:
# Prepend load path with path to librets.rb
$:.unshift(‘/usr/local/src/librets-1.1.9/project/swig/ruby’)
require ‘librets’
include Librets
Geez! That took a while. I guess if I’d had a lot of *nix experience, it would have been easier, but librets has a special Windows install that easier.
Special thanks to the CRT guys for making librets freely available.
Its not so much a “mac n00b” as a “unix n00b” as most of libRETS build is fairly non-Mac specific and more “typical open source unix.”
Of course, there’s always the mailing list (and me) to ask for help.
Although, the swig stuff needs to be integrated into the overall build. That’s never really been done, but there hasn’t been much demand either. I’ll toss that on the todo. I just wish I didn’t detest GNU autoconf so much, but sadly there isn’t much better out there.
Hey – your instructions were *almost* enough for me to get this working on Mac OS X (10.5)… Everything works fine, up until the “make ruby”, at which point I get:
%> make ruby
swig -c++ -ruby -o ruby/librets_wrap.cpp -module librets_native -Ilib/ruby librets.i
lib/ruby/std_string.i:71: Error: Syntax error in input(1).
make: *** [ruby/librets_wrap.cpp] Error 1
Any ideas? I am completely baffled by this, and I really don’t know what to look at next. Thanks in advance
Byron,
You should really be asking this question on the librets-users mailing list instead of on Dan’s blog. Lucky for you, I look at both.
In any case, swig revved and now supplies their own std_string.i so you’re running into a problem with ours having a conflict with theirs. (The next release of libRETS is going to address this.)
There’s a few things you can do. You can pull the latest libRETS from svn, which addresses this (and integrates the swig build into autoconf.) Or you can just rm librets/project/swig/lib/ruby/std_string.i and run the “make ruby” again, which should work.
–
Keith T. Garner – Managing Director – Center for REALTOR® Technology
great tutorial, just thought I’d add this. Using the latest macports ./configure on librets will balk at the dynamically linked binaries for boost. To get around this you might want to add –enable-shared_dependencies.
Note this is building librets-1.2.1 on 10.5.3
Fyi, Ports recently updated swig to 2.0. I could not get librets-1.5.1. to compile with swig 2.0.
Manually installing swig 1.3 from the swig website fixed the problem.
swig -c++ -java -package librets -o build/swig/java/librets_wrap.cpp \
-outdir build/swig/java ./project/swig/librets.i
:3: Error: Unable to find ‘java.swg’
./project/swig/librets.i:19: Error: Unable to find ‘java/boost_shared_ptr.i’
./project/swig/librets.i:20: Error: Unable to find ‘java/typemaps.i’
./project/swig/librets.i:82: Error: Unable to find ‘std_string.i’
./project/swig/librets.i:84: Error: Unable to find ‘std_vector.i’
make[1]: *** [build/swig/java/librets_wrap.cpp] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2
Just a note, that “:3: Error: Unable to find ‘java.swg’” can be resolved by installing swig-java…
sudo port install swig-java