Install Vowpal Wabbit on Mac OS X

Saturday February 2, 2013

I failed to get vw installed during the first lecture of NYU's new big data course, but I've got it installed now. Here's one way to do it:

Pre-requisites:

1. Install Xcode command line tools. This will give you Apple's collection of compilers and so on. You could probably get other ones if you prefer.
2. Install Homebrew. This seems to be the best Mac package manager at the moment. Once you have Homebrew everything else is easy to install.

Install steps (skip lines if you know you have things already):

brew install libtool
brew install automake
brew install boost
brew install git
git clone https://github.com/JohnLangford/vowpal_wabbit.git
cd vowpal_wabbit

At this point you have everything you need. You could link glibtoolize so you can refer to it as libtoolize, or you can edit the autogen.sh and put a 'g' in front of libtoolize. Do one or the other. You're ready to go through the normal make process.

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install

And you have vw at /usr/local/bin/vw. Easy!

This post was originally hosted elsewhere.