developer.apple.com and, for Lion and later releases, from the Mac App
Store. See
- http://guide.macports.org/chunked/installing.xcode.html
+ https://guide.macports.org/#installing.xcode
for details. For Xcode 4, you will need to install the command-line
tools; select Preferences from the Xcode menu, select Downloads in the
TShark, you must have also Qt installed. You can download precompiled
Qt packages and source code from
- https://www.qt.io/download-open-source/
+ https://www.qt.io/download
or use the tools/macos-setup.sh script described below.
+You should have CMake installed; you can download binary distributions
+for macOS from
+
+ https://cmake.org/download/
+
The tools/macos-setup.sh script can be used to download, patch as
necessary, build as necessary, and install those libraries and the
-libraries on which they depend; it will, by default, also install other
-libraries that can be used by Wireshark and TShark. The versions of
-libraries to download are specified by variables set early in the
-script; you can comment out the settings of optional libraries if you
-don't want them downloaded and installed. Before running the
-tools/macos-setup.sh script, and before attempting to build Wireshark,
-make sure your PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable's setting includes
-both /usr/X11/lib/pkgconfig and /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig.
+libraries on which they depend, along with tools such as CMake; it will,
+by default, also install other libraries that can be used by Wireshark
+and TShark. The versions of libraries and tools to download are
+specified by variables set early in the script; you can comment out the
+settings of optional libraries if you don't want them downloaded and
+installed. Before running the tools/macos-setup.sh script, and before
+attempting to build Wireshark, make sure your PKG_CONFIG_PATH
+environment variable's setting includes /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig.
The tools/macos-setup.sh script must be run from the top-level source
directory.
-If you wish to build the legacy (GTK+) UI you must have X11 and the X11
-developer headers and libraries installed, as well as the Pango, ATK,
-and GTK+ libraries; otherwise, you will not be able to build or install
-GTK+. The X11 and X11 SDK that come with macOS releases for releases
-from Panther to Lion can be used to build and run Wireshark. Mountain
-Lion and later do not include X11; you should install X11 from
-elsewhere, such as
+After you have installed those libraries:
- http://xquartz.macosforge.org/
+ 1. It is generally recommended to install Qt with the online installer
+ provided by Qt - see https://www.qt.io/download
-After you have installed those libraries:
+ If you are building on an Apple Silicon machine, it is highly recommended
+ to use at least Qt 6.2.4, as this architecture is not fully supported
+ with Qt 5.15
-If you are building from a Git tree, rather than from a source
-distribution tarball, run the autogen.sh script. This should not be
-necessary if you're building from a source distribution tarball, unless
-you've added new source files to the Wireshark source.
+ 2. Make a directory in which Wireshark is to be built, separate
+ from the top-level source directory for Wireshark - it can be a
+ subdirectory of that top-level source directory;
-Then run the configure script, and run make to build Wireshark.
+ 3. cd to that directory, and run CMake, with an argument that is a
+ path to the top-level source directory;
-If you upgrade the major release of macOS on which you are building
-Wireshark, we advise that, before you do any builds after the upgrade,
-you do, in the build directory:
+ 4. When CMake finishes, run make to build Wireshark.
+
+For example, to build Wireshark in a subdirectory of the top-level
+source directory, named "build", do, from the top-level source
+directory;
+
+ mkdir build
+ cd build
+ cmake ..
+ make
- If you are building from a release tarball:
- make distclean
+It is also possible to use the Xcode IDE to build and debug Wireshark
+using cmake's Xcode generator. Create a separate build directory, as
+described above and run cmake with the "-G Xcode" argument to create
+a Xcode project file in the current directory.
- If you are building from Git:
- make maintainer-clean
- ./autogen.sh
+ cmake -G Xcode ..
-Then re-run the configure script and rebuild from scratch.
+ 1. Double click Wireshark.xcodeproj
+
+ 2. Choose to create schemes manually
+
+ 3. Create a scheme for the ALL_BUILD target
+
+ 4. Edit the scheme, go to the run configuration and select Wireshark.app
+ as executable
+
+If you upgrade the major release of macOS on which you are building
+Wireshark, we advise that, before you do any builds after the upgrade,
+you remove the build directory and all its subdiretories, and repeat the
+above process, re-running CMake and rebuilding from scratch.
On Snow Leopard (10.6) and later releases, if you are building on a
machine with a 64-bit processor (with the exception of the early Intel
configure script before running the script. The tools/macos-setup.sh
setup script will patch GLib to work around this.
-GTK+ - GTK+ 2.24.10, at least, doesn't build on Mountain Lion with the
-CUPS printing backend - either the CUPS API changed incompatibly or the
-backend was depending on non-API implementation details. The
-tools/macos-setup.sh setup script will, on Mountain Lion and later,
-configure GTK+ with the CUPS printing backend disabled.
-
libgcrypt - the libgcrypt configuration script attempts to determine
which flavor of assembler-language routines to use based on the platform
type determined by standard autoconf code. That code uses uname to
is to run the configure script with the --disable-asm argument, so that
the assembler-language routines are not used. The tools/macos-setup.sh
will configure libgcrypt with that option.
-
-PortAudio - when compiling on macOS, the configure script for the
-pa_stable_v19_20071207 version of PortAudio will cause certain
-platform-dependent build environment #defines to be set in the Makefile
-rules, and to cause a universal build to be done; those #defines will be
-incorrect for all but one of the architectures for which the build is
-being done, and that will cause a compile-time error on Snow Leopard.
-Newer versions don't have this problem, but still fail to build on Lion
-if a universal build is attempted. The tools/macos-setup.sh script
-downloads a newer version, and also suppresses the universal build.
-
-GeoIP - Their man pages "helpfully" have an ISO 8859-1 copyright symbol
-in the copyright notice, but macOS's default character encoding is
-UTF-8. sed on Mountain Lion barfs at the "illegal character sequence"
-represented by an ISO 8859-1 copyright symbol, as it's not a valid UTF-8
-sequence. The tools/macos-setup.sh script uses iconv to convert the man
-page files from ISO 8859-1 to UTF-8.
-
-If you want to build Wireshark installer packages on a system that
-doesn't include Xcode 3.x or earlier, you will need to install some
-additional tools. From the Xcode menu, select the Open Developer Tool
-menu, and then select More Developer Tools... from that menu. That will
-open up a page on the Apple Developer Connection Web site; you may need
-a developer account to download the additional tools. Download the
-Auxiliary Tools for Xcode package; when the dmg opens, drag all its
-contents to the Contents/Applications subdirectory of the Xcode.app
-directory (normally /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Applications); then
-copy .../Contents/Applications/PackageMaker.app/Contents/MacOS/PackageMaker
-to /usr/bin/packagemaker (the PackageMaker app, when run from the
-command line rather than as a double-clicked app, is the packagemaker
-command).