MacPorts XCode Installation

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 26, 2022, at 12:04, Haren Samarasinghe wrote:

> After reading the installation guide [1], quite a few people that I've introduced MacPorts to have thought that a full XCode installation is required. They're uncertain of doing this due to the large amount of space it requires.
> 
> In reality, I'd say that the majority of ports only require the command line tools. In the scenarios where XCode is required for a port, the user is normally alerted to this.
> 
> I was planning on changing the docs [1][2] to show that XCode isn't required, but I wanted to first check whether this would be an acceptable change.

Yes that's a good idea.

If the port you're installing (and its dependencies) are available as binaries, you do not need Xcode and you do not need the command line tools. MacPorts will just install the binaries. MacPorts will probably print warnings about Xcode and/or CLT being missing but in this case they can be ignored.

If the port (or its dependencies) are not available as binaries, you'll probably need either Xcode or the command line tools. If you don't have them installed, you'll get warnings, and then probably a build failure.

Some ports need Xcode to build. These are (hopefully) marked with "use_xcode yes". If you try to install such a port and you do not have Xcode installed, MacPorts will tell you to install it.