Tzetze Fly

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.