Developing ZipTie on Mac OS X

This page consists of hints and tips about developing ZipTie on Mac OS X. The first thing you'll want to do is get your environment setup. ZipTie requires a number of Perl modules that are not included in the standard OS X distribution of Perl. In turn, some of these modules require the OS X gcc compiler to be installed before they will install successfully. And finally, one of the Perl modules requires a library (libexpat) that is not included in the distribution of OS X.

You may not know it but you already have a gcc compiler, it's just not installed. Located on your Mac OS X Install Disk 1 is the Apple XCode development environment. If you install this, you'll have everything you need to install the Perl modules.

1. Download the _libexpat.tar.gz_ file from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=10127&package_id=10780
2. Expand the archive by double-clicking it.
3. You should have a Folder called _expat-2.0.1_ that is created.
4. Open a bash shell (Applications→Utilities→Terminal) and 'cd' into wherever the _expat-2.0.1_ folder is located. It doesn't matter if it's on your desktop, we're going to build it, install it, and then you can delete it.
5. Type: ./Configure
6. If no errors, type: make
7. If no errors, type: sudo make install (you will have to supply your password to install it)
8. We're done. You can delete the folder, and the _expat-2.0.1.tar.gz_ file.

Execute the perlcheck.pl program that resides in your ZipTie development environment in the Build directory.

perl perlcheck.pl

This should list the Perl modules that are required by ZipTie but are missing. Follow the instructions emitted by the perlcheck.pl script to install the modules. Run perlcheck.pl again to make sure that it reports that everything is OK.