Installing a Solidity Development Environment for Ethereum Contract programming

This is a step by step tutorial to prepare your Mac for the development of Ethereum Smart Contracts in Solidity.

We assume you have a fresh macOS installation, with no development tools and no Ethereum software (like a wallet app) installed. It is always a good idea to do development in an isolated environment which is not used for any other purpose.

1. Install homebrew

Homebrew is the packet manager for macOS you will need for installation of the most tools we use throughout this tutorial.

To install homebrew issue this command in terminal:

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

The installation requires some interaction from you. So watch progress and enter the information requested!

2. Install Ethereum

Now that homebrew is installed, we will use it to install the latest version of Ethereum:

$ brew tap ethereum/ethereum

and then:

$ brew tap ethereum/ethereum

This will as well install one of the most important tools for our development plans: geth, the go command line interface for Ethereum.

Just check it by issuing

$ geth

If everything went right, geth will start up and begin synchronizing the Ethereum blockchain to your Mac. As we don't want this by now, enter [CTRL]+[C] in the terminal window running geth. Just ignore the errors popping up, if any!

3. Install the Solidity Compiler

Solidity is the programming language of choice for implementing smart contracts on the Ethereum network. In order to be able to run our contracts, we have to compile them. So we need the compiler:

$ brew install solidity

Depending on the power of your Mac it might take a while for the installation to complete. Even if it lingers around an installation step (e.g. installing "boost") for several minutes (or even hours): Just be patient and wait! It will finish! I suggest spending your time watching the CPU load in Activity Monitor.

Congratulations! Now you're up and running to start your own Ethereum development network and start implementing your first smart contract!

So please proceed to the next part of this tutorial: Getting started with a private Ethereum Blockchain and Solidity Contract Development on geth 1.6 or higher