# Installing on Mac OS X

## Supported platforms

- 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
- 10.7 (Lion)
- 10.8 (Mountain Lion)
- 10.9 (Mavericks)
- 10.10 (Yosemite)
- 10.11 (El Capitan)

## Prerequisites

To develop applications using the GStreamer SDK for OS X you will need OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) or later and XCode 3.2.6 or later.

The recommended system is macOS Sierra with XCode 8

## Download and install the SDK

There are 3 sets of files in the SDK:

- The runtime files are needed to run GStreamer applications. You probably want to distribute these files with your application (or the installer below).
- The development files are additional files you need to create GStreamer applications.
- Mac OS X packages that you can use with PackageMaker to deploy GStreamer with your application

Get both the runtime and the development installers from the GStreamer download page and please install both of them:

- The runtime installer is e.g. `gstreamer-1.0-{VERSION}-x86_64.pkg`, and
- The development installer is e.g. `gstreamer-1.0-devel-{VERSION}-x86_64.pkg`

> On Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) you have to install Python 2.7 manually. It is included in later versions of OS X already. You can get it from here.

The downloads are Installer Packages (.pkg).

Double click the package file and follow the instructions presented by the install wizard. In case the system complains about the package not being signed, you can control-click it and open to start the installation. When you do this, it will warn you, but there is an option to install anyway. Otherwise you can go to System Preferences → Security and Privacy → General and select the option to allow installation of packages from "anywhere".

These are some paths of the GStreamer framework that you might find useful:

- /Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework/: Framework's root path
- /Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework/Versions: path with all the versions of the framework
- /Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework/Versions/Current: link to the current version of the framework
- /Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework/Headers: path with the development headers
- /Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework/Commands: link to the commands provided by the framework, such as gst-inspect-1.0 or gst-launch-1.0

For more information on OS X Frameworks anatomy, you can consult the following link

## Configure your development environment

### Building the tutorials

The tutorials code, along with project files and a solution file for them all, are in the gst-docs in the `examples/tutorials` subdirectory.

To start building the tutorials, create a new folder in your Documents directory and copy the folder `/Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework/Current/share/gst-sdk/tutorials`.

You can fire up XCode and load the project file.

Press the Run button to build and run the first tutorial. You can switch the tutorial to build selecting one of the available schemes.

### Creating new projects

The GStreamer binaries provides a framework that you can drag and drop to XCode to start using it, or using the linker option -framework GStreamer*.*

There is a small exception to the regular use of frameworks, and you will need to manually include the headers search path `/Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework/Headers`

- XCode: Add the headers path to Search Paths → Header Search Paths
- GCC: Using the compiler option -I/Library/Frameworks/GStreamer.framework/Headers

The results of the search are