How do I install Riak on OS X?

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To install Riak on OS X I will assume you are installing on Snow Leapard. First you will need to install Erlang, at least version 5.7.4 or above, which is what Riak needs as a minimum to work. To install Erlang you will need something called "ports" which allows you to install third party software onto a Mac. You can get ports from this site:

http://www.macports.org/

: Follow the instructions and once you have installed ports then it will most likely be installed in the following directory:

/opt/local/bin

: So then open a Terminal (go to Finder -> Main Mac drive -> Applications -> Terminal) also known as the command prompt and execute the command:

port

: to see if it works. If it doesn't then you need to tell your Mac where it can find programs to run:

PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH

: Hint: This sets what is known as an environment variable on the Mac. To see a list of all the enviroment variables type "set" at the command prompt

port install erlang

Once this has completed then type:

erl

: This should start off the erl interactive command line and should look something like this:

# erl

Erlang R13B03 (erts-5.7.4) [source] [smp:2:2] [rq:2] [async-threads:0] [kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V5.7.4 (abort with ^G)

: Note the version number. It should be at least 5.7.4.

Next you need to install "wget". wget is a utility used to retrieve software packages from the internet. So first you must install wget with:

port install wget

: and then download Riak itself. We use "cd /" here so that we store

everything in the root Mac directory but you can store it where ever

you like.

cd /

wget http://hg.basho.com/riak/get/riak-0.7.1.tar.gz

Then we unpack the compress Riak file with:

tar xzf riak-0.7.1.tar.gz

: this should create a directory called Riak. Type ls or go to finder and you should see the Riak directory under the root directory. Then you have to build Riak from the source code:

cd riak

make all rel

export RIAK=`pwd`

: And finally to test the installation:

cd rel/riak

bin/riak start

bin/riak-admin test

should produce something like:

=INFO REPORT==== 5-Feb-2010::08:33:12 ===

Successfully completed 1 read/write cycle to 'riak@127.0.0.1'

This tests that it can connect to Riak .

Thats it for installing Riak on the Mac. Most of the other things in Riak are not Mac specific so you should be able to follow them just fine.