Section 3.2. Installing on Mac OS X

3.2. Installing on Mac OS X

Like Linux, Apple's Mac OS X is a UNIX-like operating system. It was originally based on the open source FreeBSD operating system, which was itself derived from the University of California, Berkeley-developed BSD UNIX. On top of the UNIX underpinnings, Apple has built its own excellent graphical user interface. Regardless of whether you prefer to deal with OS X using the GUI or from under the hood at the command line, you have options for installing Subversion that should meet your needs.

3.2.1. Installing OS X Binaries

Installing the Subversion client on OS X is trivial. The Subversion Web site provides a link to prepackaged binaries of Subversion. To install, all you need to do is download the Subversion disk image (.dmg), mount it, and then launch the installer package (.pkg extension). The installer will take you through a typical OS X install process that will set up everything to allow you to run Subversion from the command line, using Terminal.app or another terminal emulator.

3.2.2. Compiling Subversion on OS X

Compiling Subversion by hand on OS X should be as simple as compilation on Linux, and should follow the same process. Before installing, though, you may need to install the Apple Developer Tools, which are available for free from Apple's developer site (developer.apple.com). Installing the developer tools will install the GCC compiler, as well as a number of other development utilities, such as GNU Make.

3.2.3. Using Fink

An alternate way to install Subversion for OS X is through the Fink package management system. Fink provides a reasonably easy way for many open source packages (mostly from the UNIX world) to be installed. If you don't have Fink installed already, you can get it from fink.sourceforge.net. When Fink is installed, you can install Subversion from the command line.

To install the SVN client from the command line, open Terminal.app, and run sudo fink install svn-client. Additionally, you can install several other packages if you would like to get different versions of the Subversion server. Installing the svn package, for instance, will get you the standalone svnserve Subversion server, whereas the package libapache2-mod-svn will get you everything you need to serve the repository over WebDAV, via Apache. If you would like the Subversion documentation, you can install the svn-doc package.