[macos] Using 'make' on OS X

I have a MacBook Pro that I'm trying to do some development on.

I have a program I want to build, and when I went to use make to build it, I got a "command not found" error. I did some googling and Stack Overflow searches and it doesn't look like this is a common problem. Why don't I have make installed and how do I get it?

I'm extra confused, because I know I used it relatively recently (in the past month or so) when I was on this laptop.

I found the Developer Tools not as readily available as others. In El Capitan, in terminal I just used gcc -v, it then said gcc wasn't available and asked if I wanted to install the command line Apple Developer Tools. No downloading of Xcode required. Terminal session below:

Pauls-MBP:~ paulhillman$ gcc -v
xcode-select: note: no developer tools were found at '/Applications/Xcode.app', requesting install. Choose an option in the dialog to download the command line developer tools.
Pauls-MBP:~ paulhillman$ gcc -v
Configured with: --prefix=/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr --with-gxx-include-dir=/usr/include/c++/4.2.1
Apple LLVM version 7.3.0 (clang-703.0.31)
Target: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0
Thread model: posix
InstalledDir: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin

I believe you can also get just the Xcode command-line tools which is about 170 MB.. It's described in the 'brew' setup guide: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/installation and can be found here: https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action#

Edit: this was already mentioned above by @josh

For those of you who get to this page using Xcode 4.3 and Lion, the command line tools are no longer bundled by default, and there is no /Developer anymore. To install them, open Xcode, go to Preferences -> Downloads -> Components -> Command Line Tools. This should install make, gcc etc.

If you've installed Xcode 4.3 and its Command Line Tools, just open Terminal and type the following: On Xcode 4.3, type the following in Terminal:

export PATH=$PATH:/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/usr/bin

There is now another way to install the gcc toolchain on OS X through the osx-gcc-installer this includes:

• GCC
• LLVM
• Clang
• Developer CLI Tools (purge, make, etc)
• DevSDK (headers, etc)

The download is 282MB vs 3GB for Xcode.

I agree with the other two answers: install the Apple Developer Tools.

But it is also worth noting that OS X ships with ant and rake.

For Xcode 4.1 you can simply add /Developer/usr/bin to the PATH environment variable. This is easily done:

$ export PATH=$PATH:/Developer/usr/bin

Also be certain to update your ~/.bashrc (or ~/.profile or ~/.bash_login) file.

You will have to install the "Developer Tools" that are provided as optional packages in OS X installation disks.

In addition, if you have migrated your user files and applications from one mac to another, you need to install Apple Developer Tools all over again. The migration assistant does not account for the developer tools installation.

@Daniel's suggestion worked perfectly for me. To install

make

, open Xcode, go to Preferences -> Downloads -> Components -> Command Line Tools.You can then test with

gcc -v