Installing Valgrind on OS X El Capitan

February 27, 2016
Nifty

I recently had to install Valgrind on OS X El Capitan for a class assignment. It wasn’t straightforward. Hope this helps someone on the interwebs! Enjoy those deciphering those memory leaks in C 🙂

This only works if you have Homebrew set up.

sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local # sets your user has the owner of /usr/local (might take a while) 
cd /usr/local
git reset --hard origin/master # cleans up any uncommitted, untracked changes in Homebrew
brew doctor # have brew fix and clean up packages
brew update
HOMEBREW_CC=gcc HOMEBREW_AR=gar brew install valgrind # will definitely take a while

If that doesn’t work, then you can install Valgrind straight from the source

# cd into the Valgrind directory, I would put it in /usr/bin
./configure --prefix=/usr/bin
make
sudo make install

Until next time 😛

Be bold, take flight — tryangles!