There is a fully packaged version of OLA you can just install, for both MacPorts and Homebrew (sudo brew install ola), which is much easier than the process below if you don’t want to make local code changes.

Install a Compiler

The easiest is to install Xcode.

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

Install OLA Dependencies

The easiest way is to install the dependencies using MacPorts.

Once you have MacPorts installed, first update its list of packages by running the following command.

 sudo port -v selfupdate

Then run the following command to download and build the dependencies.

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

You may need to change which Python 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.

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 protobuf was 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.

Checkout or Download an Archive

You can either download a tarball, or pull the latest version from the git repo

Tarball

Download the most recent tarball from Github.

Extract using

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

Git

If you don’t have git yet, you’ll need to install it, either through Macports or Brew, or download an installer.

 sudo port install git

Check out the git repo with the following command:

 git clone https://github.com/OpenLightingProject/ola.git ola
 cd ola

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