Macports without root on Leopard (and Tiger)

Peter Burkholder — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:02:00 -0700

I don’t have root on my desktop Mac at $WORK, even though I have root on about 1200 production systems. sigh

So, I asked my Mac administrator to install the XCode development tools. Once that was done, all I needed to was the following.

Download the MacPort.tar.bz source distribution: http://svn.macports.org/repository/macports/downloads/MacPorts-1.6.0/MacPorts-1.6.0.tar.bz2

Note: For Leopard, one needs to apply the patch from http://trac.macports.org/changeset/32105

Run the following:


  tar -jxf MacPorts-1.6.0.tar.bz2 && cd MacPorts-1.6.0

  PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin ./configure \
  --prefix=$HOME/macports \
  --with-install-user=`id -un` \
  --with-install-group=`id -gn` \
  --x-includes=/usr/X11R6/include \
  --x-libraries=/usr/X11R6/lib \
  --with-tclpackage=$HOME/macports/share/macports/Tcl

  make
  make install

Add something like the following to your Mac’s .bashrc>


  export PATH=$HOME/macports/bin:$HOME/macports/sbin
  export MANPATH=$HOME/macports/share/man:$MANPATH
  export PERL5LIB=$HOME/macports/lib/perl5/5.8.8:$HOME/macports/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.8:$PERL5LIB

Run a selfupdate: port selfupdate
Now you do can do cool things like learn Scheme over lunch with: port search scheme; port install mzscheme

I’ve added this to the MacPorts wiki

Ellipsis: Tag 10.5

Macports without root on Leopard (and Tiger)