troubleshooting - installing protobuf from source in mac arm64 (apple silicon)
Context
I was following the streamlit contribution guide, and one of their requirements when setting up your local development environment was to match the system version of protobuf with the pip installed version.
You can check your system’s protobuf version with:
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protoc --version
Identifying that my system’s protobuf version (25.1) was different from the pip installed version (3.20.3) was not difficult, but installing protobuf 3.20.3 was challenging as protobuf does not support osx-universal binary or osx-arm64 version of 3.20.3.
So I decided to find a way to install protobuf from source, which is not a usual way to install things.
I hope this can help whoever faces a similar issue in Apple Silicon machines.
Environment
- macOS Monterey 12.6.3
- OSX arm64 (Apple Silicon)
- zshell
- This tutorial is effective as of January 2024
Clone source repository
In the desired protobuf release page (mine is 3.20.3 in this case), find a source code zip or tar.gz file and download it.
After unzipping the file in local, cd (change directory) into the protobuf repository.
Build from source
Install necessary build tools from homebrew.
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brew install autoconf
brew install automake
brew install Libtool
Then run the following commands inside protobuf root directory to build and install from the source code.
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autoreconf -i
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
export PATH=/opt/usr/local/bin:$PATH
With this, hopefully you would have installed the desired version of protobuf.
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protoc --version
# should be libprotoc 3.20.3 now
Korean Equivalent Post
Mac arm64 (apple silicon)에 protobuf 소스 파일로 설치하기
Reference
Please feel free to point out any inaccurate or insufficient information. Also, please feel free to leave any questions or suggestions in the comments. 🙇♂️