Installing Lazarus on macOS

Overview

Unfortunately, there is no native Aqua-version of Lazarus for Mac OS X.

Required software

• Install Apple´s X11, available on your Mac OS X Installation Disk.

For Mac OS X 10.3.x (but not for any other Mac OS X version!) also at Apple. For Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger you must install X11 from your tiger DVD. This is for OS X to be able to display X11 programs. Tip: Drag the X11-Icon from /Applications/Utilities/X11 into the Dock for convenient starting.

• Install Apple´s XCode, available on your Mac OS X Installation Disk or at Apple Developer Connection (requires creation of account, but the free online program is enough). This installs the XCode IDE and all the developer stuff.
• Install fink, available at Sourceforge. This is an OS X 'apt-get'esque package system.
• Check if installation was successful, open a Terminal and type:

 echo $PATH

This should give you:

 /sw/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

• After successfull installation of the above, open a Terminal and type:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install glib glib-shlibs gtk+-shlibs gdk-pixbuf-shlibs

This installs GTK.

• Install fpc and Lazarus as .dmg for Mac OS X. Now your´re ready to run.

How to get going

• Start X11.
• You get your XTerm. Focus it and type

cd /usr/share/lazarus/
./lazarus

Lazarus as Icon

You can drag and drop the X11 app onto your dock to have a one-click way of starting X11.

To simplify starting Lazarus, in X11, choose Applications | Customize, then click Add Item. Under Name enter Lazarus, under Command enter the following:

open -a /usr/local/share/lazarus/lazarus

Click Done to close. Now you can start Lazarus from X11 simply by choosing Applications | Lazarus.

BEWARE: if you use the below svn, then use

 open -a /Users/yourname/pascal/lazarus/lazarus

How to update fpc and Lazarus to the newest version

• Install SVN for Mac OS X: A good package is provided by Martin Ott.
• Then follow Installing_Lazarus#Downloading_Lazarus_SVN