Setup on Macintosh

The following instructions have been tested on OS X 10.4 Tiger.

Update OS X

Be sure you've run Software Update and installed all pending updates before continuing. This ensures that you have the latest Java binaries.

Install Ant 1.7.0

Create a bin directory inside your home directory.

Download the Apache Ant Project's archived release of Ant 1.7.0 here and unzip it. Put the apache-ant-1.7.0 folder that's inside the ZIP in the newly created bin folder. Make sure that Ant's bin folder is at ~/bin/apache-ant-1.7.0/bin.

(Optional) Install Ant 1.6.2

If you intend to build an older branch (e.g. branches/3.x), you need Ant 1.6.2.

Create a bin directory inside your home directory.

Download the Apache Ant Project's archived release of Ant 1.6.2 here and unzip it. Put the apache-ant-1.6.2 folder that's inside the ZIP in the newly created bin folder. Make sure that Ant's bin folder is at ~/bin/apache-ant-1.6.2/bin.

Configure Flash Player

mm.cfg

Download mm.cfg into your home directory. This file specifies

ErrorReportingEnable=1
TraceOutputFileEnable=1

If your system already has an mm.cfg file, paste these two lines into it.

FlashPlayerTrust

Open the directory ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/#Security. If it doesn't already contain a directory named FlashPlayerTrust, create one. Download FlexSDK.cfg into FlashPlayerTrust.

This file simply contains

/

so that SWFs anywhere on your system are trusted to load local content. We actually recommend you change this to be as restrictive as possible to your dev environment, either just the SDK directory or perhaps a specific development directory. Opening up your system to / can allow malicious SWFs to access data they normally might not be able to.

Also note: If you are getting "Security Sandbox Violation" errors (e.g. when running ant checkintests), you may need to use more specific directories than "/", e.g. "/Users/gordon/". You may put one on each line.

Test your setup

To test your setup, launch Terminal, change your working directory to the trunk of the Flex SDK, and run its setup.sh script:

cd flex/sdk/trunk
source setup.sh

Execute

java -version

and confirm that Java 1.5.0_13 is being found (you may have a revisions other than 13).

Execute

ant -version

and confirm that Ant 1.7.0 is being found.