Building the MEME Suite on Apple OS X Mountain Lion

[CharlesEGrant]

Earlier versions of Apple OS X installed many of the standard GNU tools for software development automatically when XCode was installed. With OS X Mountain Lion this is no longer the case. You'll have to manually download and install them.

First you'll need to install the prerequisites for MEME:

1. Install the Apple software development environment, XCode. XCode is a free download from the Apple App store. If you don't have an App store account it can also be downladed from the Apple developer's web site. 

2. Download the command line development tools from within XCode. Under the "XCode" menu choose the "Preference ..." item. You'll be presented with a dialog box with several tabs. Select the "Downloads" tab, and click on the button to download the command line tools. Helpful link: OS X Mountain Lion: Need to reinstall Xcode command line tools

3. Download and install Macports.

 4. Add '/opt/local/bin' to your execution PATH. This is done with the command:

 

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin

5. This step is optional, and is only required if you are a developer building MEME from a checkout from the SVN repository. Use MacPorts to install the 'autotools': autoconf, automake, and libtool, as well as the command line web tool elinks. This is done with the following commands:

sudo port install autoconf
sudo port install automake
sudo port install libtool
sudo port install elinks

6. Use MacPorts to install some of the tools required by MEME. This is done with the following commands:

sudo port install ghostscript
sudo port install mpich
sudo port install libxslt

7. Download the MEME source, and un-pack it from the compressed tar file. Change directory into the MEME distribution directory.

8. Determine any missing Perl modules. To do this run the command:

 

perl scripts/dependencies.pl

Note that some of the dependencies listed will only be required if you are installing a copy of the MEME Web server. cpanminus is a convenient tool for installing Perl modules. To install cpanminus run the commands:

 

curl -o cpanm -L http://cpanmin.us
sudo perl./cpanm App::cpanminus

Once you've installed cpanminus any missing Perl modules can be installed using the command:

sudo cpanm <module_name>

where <module_name> should be replaced with the name of the missing module.

Your system should now be ready to build and install MEME.

If you are a developer installing from the SVN repository and building MEME for the first time you'll first need to run the command

./bootstrap

To build, test, and install MEME run the commands:

./configure [ options ]
make
make test
make install

You should replace "[ options ]" with the configuration options needed for your system. See the MEME installation guide for a list.

[Burak Han]

Thanks for this post.

I have three comments:
1. It would be great if you can add these instructions in one of README or INSTALL files or the download page for meme. It took me a while to figure out what was going on.
2. The PATH should read:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH

and not the other way around. I copied and pasted without looking and it took me another while longer to figure out why the build failed.
3. mpich is no longer available. To get mpicc and mpirun working I needed to do:
sudo port install openmpi     

sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/openmpirun /opt/local/bin/mpirun
sudo ln -s /opt/local/bin/openmpicc /opt/local/bin/mpicc