Developing 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.

Install The Mac OS X Compiler

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.

Installing libexpat

1. Download the libexpat.tar.gz file from here
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.

Installing Perl Modules

You have to install these as the root user.

1. Open a bash shell (Applications->Utilities->Terminal).
2. Type: sudo cpan (you will have to supply your password to gain root priviliges)
3. Answer a lot of questions. You only have to do this once. The only one you probably can't just take the default for is the one where you select your country and download mirrors.
4. Eventually you end up at a prompt. From here you need to install the required modules one by one, for example...
5. Type: install Socket6
6. This should build and install the Socket6 library. Below is what I believe to be the comprehensive list of required modules. These may change over time, but the error message you would get from Perl will tell you the name of the missing module. Installing them is the same as the process described above.

Modules: Note: don't be surprised if you don't have to install all of these because CPAN's dependency resolution will automatically install some of them as a side-effect of installing others.

Net::Telnet
XML::Simple
LWP::UserAgent
HTTP::Response
HTTP::Request
XML::Twig
Net::TFTP
IO::Zlib
Term::VT102
XML::SemanticDiff
Test::XML
XML::XPath
Compress::Zlib
Archive::Tar
Socket6
Crypt::DES
Net::SNMP
Digest::SHA1
Digest::HMAC