Installing MediaDrop on a Mac is a bit more complicated than doing so on Linux because Mac OS does not come with all the required packages. However once it is working you can run MediaDrop on Mac just fine.
The following documentation was tested with a client version of Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion).
Please note: I’m not a Mac user myself so I’d be glad to improve this section based on your input (e.g. other Mac OS versions, installation on Mac OS server edition, alternate install methods).
First you need to install Xcode and its “Command Line Tools” (Xcode – Preferences – Downloads) so you have a working compiler. You can check your system by using the which command:
which cc
This checks to see if we have the compiler ready. No output after hitting return means it’s not installed; output indicates that it is installed and tells us exactly where it is in our system.
Now that you’ve got XCode installed, we need to set up Python. Every Mac does come with an Apple-provided system version, but it is safest and best practice to not use this and instead install a fresh version. There are a few ways of doing this, but for our purposes it is best to do so with Homebrew.
Install Homebrew by following the instructions on the website. Please note that you can use other such tools such as MacPorts, but Homebrew is highly recommended for its interactive help. If you already have MacPorts installed (if it’s new to you, then you probably don’t), Homebrew will indicate to you that you need to delete MacPorts, and even provide the necessary command to execute.
Let’s get a new fresh version of Python:
brew install python
After this install occurs it’s best if we grab the location of this new python so we can be assured that we use it for the remainder of this tutorial:
BREWPYTHON=`brew ls python | grep 'python$' | grep -v 'Frameworks' | sed 's/\/python$//'`
This above command looks convoluted but all it does is set the variable “BREWPYTHON” to the location of brew’s python, which we’ll use in the following section.
Now that we have Xcode and Python installed, now we need to get the necessary system libraries:
brew install libjpeg
Mac OS X server comes with a bundled MySQL server which you can use. However you need at least the MySQL client library and the matching development header files. In Homebrew these are all in one package but of course you don’t have to use their MySQL server if you already have one.
brew install mysql
As with all brew commands, it print out some useful information that we may need to get the installed software to work as expected. MediaDrop will actually need the MySQL server running, which brew doesn’t do for you, but it does tell you how:
mysql.server start
Before installing MediaDrop we also need virtualenv. Virtualenv will manage any future software that MediaDrop needs to ensure that it does not conflict with any other software, similar to sandboxing. Since we used Homebrew to install our Python, and remembering have we’ve set up the variable “BREWPYTHON”, we can do this:
$BREWPYTHON/pip install virtualenv
Now we need to create a “virtual environment” (see Step 1: Setup a Python Virtual Environment) with the following command:
/usr/local/share/python/virtualenv --no-site-packages /path/to/venv
Finally, we can activate this virtual environment, which we’ll have to do when we’re working with MediaDrop, with the following command:
source /path/to/venv/bin/activate
The command line prompt will change to indicate that you are now within a virtual environment, and you can continue the installation process.