Building PyGTK for Mac

In the past couple of months a number of people have asked me to provide new native Mac PyGTK builds. I do not use PyGTK anymore, so I don't have time to maintain these builds - sorry. Out of curiosity I recently built PyGTK on my Snow Leopard (10.6.6) machine, just to see if the process has gotten any easier, and I must say that it has. I was able to build the entire thing without any hacking. So, to those of you asking me to provide new builds, here you have a complete HOWTO of how to build a native Mac PyGTK:

1. Create a new user account (to make sure that no MacPorts/Fink/other libraries are available in the environment)


2. Install git (http://code.google.com/p/git-osx-installer/downloads/list?can=3)


3. Log in to the new account (I ssh'ed in from a Terminal)


4. Download the build script (https://github.com/jralls/gtk-osx-build/raw/master/gtk-osx-build-setup.sh)


5. Add ~/.local/bin to PATH


6. Edit ~/.jhbuildrc-custom setting setup_sdk like so: setup_sdk(target="10.6", sdk_version="10.6", architectures=["i386"])


7. Run these build commands:
   
   
   
   1. $ jhbuild bootstrap
   
   
   2. $ jhbuild build meta-gtk-osx-bootstrap
   
   
   3. $ jhbuild build meta-gtk-osx-core
   
   
   4. $ jhbuild build pygtk
   
   
   
   


8. Download the PyGTK hello world script (http://www.pygtk.org/pygtk2tutorial/examples/helloworld.py)


9. Update your PYTHONPATH: export export PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:~/gtk/inst/lib/python2.6/site-packages


10. Make sure that 32-bit Python is used: export VERSIONER_PYTHON_PREFER_32_BIT=yes


11. Test your build by running the hello world script: python helloworld.py

Note that to perform the last step you need to be properly logged in (not just through SSH).

I hope that this helps some of the people that have asked me about PyGTK builds. Happy hacking ;-)