I’ve been doing some research lately into using Google Protocol Buffers on an iOS device. In my initial search for a library and compiler for Objective-C files I found this site. As of this writing, it hadn’t been touched in about 2 years, but I thought I’d give it a try anyhow. After several hours of trying and failing to get the compiler working, I asked Google for another suggestion. That’s when I found this project on Git link
It was still a little dated, almost 6 months since the last edit, but not nearly as bad as the other project. Apparently this project and the other are related since the same installation and usage instructions found on metasyntactic seem to apply to the Booyah Inc. project. It took me awhile to get the compiler up and running, so I thought I’d share the steps I took. Here are the installation instructions that I had to follow to get it working on a MacBook Pro. When I started the process I already had installed Xcode, so the steps begin from there.
Install Xcode Command Line Tools
- In Xcode click Xcode > Preferences… > Downloads tab > Command Line Tools Install button
Install Homebrew
- Install HomeBrew if you haven’t already by typing the following into a terminal window and following the steps: ruby -e “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/mxcl/homebrew/go)”
- Type brew doctor into the terminal to be sure that HomeBrew will operate correctly. This should be done before installing anything through Homebrew.
Install missing tools needed to install protocol buffers
- Open a terminal and type brew install automake
- Once that has completed,type brew install libtool
Install Google Protocol Buffers
- Download Google Protocol Buffers
- NOTE: The current version of protobuf-objc isn’t compatible with Google Protocol Buffers 2.5.0, so you must install 2.4.1.
- Unzip the directory and move it to any directory you’d like. I use a directory called
/!ThirdParty - Open a Terminal
- Navigate to the protocol buffers directory (protobuf-2.5.0)
- Type ./configure and press return
- Type make and press return
- Type make check to see if it installed correctly
- Type make install to install the programs
Install Objective C Protocol Buffers compiler (protobuf-objc)
- Check out the git project git://github.com/booyah/protobuf-objc.git into your third party code area
- In order to configure ProtocolBuffers you need to download and install Google Protocol Buffers
- In a Terminal window, navigate to the ProtocolBuffers directory and type ./autogen.sh
- Type ./configure and press return
- Type make and press return
- Type make install and press return
Again, these are just the steps that I took. If you already have the files/programs that I installed using HomeBrew, then you can obviously skip those steps.
I only had to use Homebrew for a few installs, but from that experience I can tell you that it really saved me a lot of time and effort in getting that stuff installed otherwise. I’m coming from a newer Mac user stance on that.
Let me know if I left anything out or if the steps don’t work for you.
Thanks! Matt
