Why not try something new and fresh! Buildr, a maven-compatible software building system based on Ruby, with better performance and ease of use. It’s based on Ruby and is currently under incubation at Apache. Here is how you install it on Mac OS 10.5 with help from MacPorts.

And what is MacPorts about?

“The MacPorts Project is an open-source community initiative to design an easy-to-use system for compiling, installing, and upgrading either command-line, X11 or Aqua based open-source software on the Mac OS X operating system.”

MacPorts will make installation and maintenance of your building toolbox easy, so everyone should have it on their mac. It does require that you have Apple’s XCode tools installed, so find your Leopard DVD and install XCode if you haven’t done so already. Now download the MacPorts package and install it. It takes some minutes as it browses its online repository to auto-update itself after installation.

Most likely you must set your PATH after installation:

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

Restart Terminal or do source .profile and you should be set. Now and then you might want to let MacPorts update its local information about the latest available stuff:

sudo port -v selfupdate

Update: with latest Mac OS X you can skip the Ruby and RubyGems installation. Go straight to the buildr part.

Next step is to make sure that you have Ruby and RubyGems on your mac, because Buildr requires it. Ruby does come preinstalled on Mac OS X but it’s a slightly older version. So get the latest and greatest by typing

sudo port install ruby

and wait for lot’s of stuff to happen. Continue with RubyGems:

sudo port install rb-rubygems

which will give you the nice package handler RubyGems. RubyGems make installing other things really easy. Well, it should be easy but something deep down in the dependency chain makes installation a bit obscure.

And finally, to install buildr:

sudo su -
export JAVA_HOME=’/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home’
gem install buildr
exit

Done! Next step is to write your buildfile. Have fun!