This page is targeted at those who wish to develop and build the freesurfer source code on their Mac OSX platform. These instructions have been tested for Mac 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.7 (Lion) and 10.8 (Mountain Lion).

1. Get the Source Code

If you already have a working local copy of the CVS repository then you can skip this step.

export CVSROOT=/space/repo/1/dev

# Or for remote CVS:
export CVSROOT=:ext:USER@door.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu:/space/repo/1/dev

# Dev version:
cvs checkout -P dev

# Stable version:
cvs checkout -P -r stable5 dev

2. Get the Libraries

If you are at the NMR Center and already have /usr/pubsw/packages mounted on your system then you can skip this step.

Freesurfer builds against a set of open-sourced libraries. Special bundles of this open-source code are available on the distribution site. Once you have downloaded the bundle, execute the following command to install them into the /usr/pubsw/packages directory:

mkdir -p /usr/pubsw/packages
tar -C /usr/pubsw/packages -xzvf DownLoadedFileName.tar.gz

NOTE: If you are building on a Lion or Mountain Lion platform (OSX 10.7 or 10.8) you MUST install qt4.7.4 on your system. This is an unfortunate consequence related to difficulties in building against the compiled version of Qt. Click the following link to download qt-mac-opensource-4.7.4.dmg and install.

You will also need gfortan. If this is not on your system, you can download it from here http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortranBinaries#MacOS

3. Set Your Path

export PATH=/usr/pubsw/packages/autotools/bin:$PATH

4. Setup, Configure, Make

Determine the location you want Freesurfer to be installed. For example, in case case we will assume the user wants freesurfer to be installed in /Users/zkaufman/freesurfer. Type the following commands in the top-level Freesurfer directory (the directory that contains configure.in and all the mri_* and mris_* directories.)

If your on Mac OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard):

./setup_configure
./configure \
      --prefix=/Users/zkaufman/freesurfer
make -j4
make install

If your on Mac OSX 10.7 or 10.8 (Lion or Mountain Lion):

./setup_configure
./configure \
      --prefix=/Users/zkaufman/freesurfer \
      --disable-tcltk-apps \
      --with-qt=/usr/bin \
      --with-Mac32-GUIs
make -j4
make install

Done!

Send your comments/questions/feedback to zkaufman@nmr.mgh.harvard.edu