Compiling Kristall for MacOS

I was looking for a good gemini browser for MacOS and couldn’t find anything pre-built, so thought I would try to find one I could build from source. Here I found a list of reviews for several gemini clients, and I decided to just try one. Kristall looked like a good option for MacOS since it was Qt based.

So I finally did it after 2.5 hours. Most of that was just downloading and installing the requirements, but here are the steps:

• git clone the Kristall repository
• It needs Qt, so download the open source version of Qt installer. Be warned you will need to create an account with Qt to complete the install.
• Do the install and follow the instructions if you need to create an account. It may warn you that XCode command line tools are missing. Dismiss that warning and complete the next step:
• If you don’t have it, install XCode by going to the MacOS App store to install it.
• At this point your hard drive is about 30 GB fatter (ooph)
• According to the building instructions you will need to run ‘make build/kristall’ from the git repository. Oh, but your MacOS can’t find qmake??
• You might need to add ‘/Users/yourusername/Qt/5.15.0/clang_64/bin/qmake’ to your path (not exactly- modify as needed for your actual Qt install)
• So now there is a compile error that it can’t find openssl/sha.h. Seems Apple doesn’t use this anymore so you will need to install it using brew. If you don’t have brew, first install it. Then you can install the openssl header you need.
• And now try to rebuild using ‘make build/kristall’ and did it finally work?? If you have a kristall.app file in your repo’s build folder you did it!!