Notes for Mac Users

The following notes were compiled for macOS Catalina 10.15.7

Installing the prerequisite software
You will need several pieces of software that don't come preinstalled on a Mac. A very popular method for installing the software you need is through Homebrew. To install Homebrew run the following in the terminal:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

Doing this will also download and install the Xcode command line tools. (This can take some time to complete.) Once Homebrew has been installed use it as follows to install the necessary software.

brew install git make cdrtools openjdk gnu-sed wget cmake maven

To make that software available, your PATH needs to be amended in your bashrc / zshrc file:

echo PATH="/usr/local/opt/openjdk/bin:/usr/local/opt/make/libexec/gnubin:/usr/local/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin:$PATH" >> .bashrc

Update your environment with:

source .bashrc

To test that the above was done correctly, run:

which sed git make mkisofs java wget cmake mvn

and you should get back:

/usr/local/opt/gnu-sed/libexec/gnubin/sed /usr/local/bin/git /usr/local/opt/make/libexec/gnubin/make /usr/local/bin/mkisofs /usr/local/opt/openjdk/bin/java /usr/local/bin/wget /usr/local/bin/cmake /usr/local/bin/mvn

Downloading the VASSAL source code
The source code is available on GitHub.

git clone https://github.com/vassalengine/vassal

Now that we have the source code we need to run the configuration script to properly configure your build environment.

cd vassal ./bootstrap.sh

Now you need to make some modifications to the default Makefile, that is written for a Linux environment. Grab the patch with:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tinjaw/mac-vassal/main/macos.patch

Then apply the patch with:

git apply macos.patch

Now build.

make release-macosx