Installing Netatalk 2 on macOS

See Also

• Compile Netatalk from Source: macOS in the Manual
• INSTALL.md in the source tree

Introduction

Apple started to switch from AFP to SMB file sharing from Mavericks (10.9) onwards. The built-in afp server was finally removed in Big Sur (11.0) so Netatalk comes in useful if you have a modern Intel or Apple Silicon Mac and wish to share files with a vintage Mac such as a PowerMac G3 or G4 running classic Mac OS 9.

When installing Netatalk 2.3 on Macs running Mojave (10.14) onwards the dependencies are easily installed using Homebrew. To install Homebrew, open Terminal and paste the following:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsS https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Install the dependencies

brew install berkeley-db libtool automake autoconf libevent libgcrypt mysql [email protected] libressl pkg-config

Clone the Netatalk repository

Checkout the 2.3 branch and cd to that folder:

git clone https://github.com/Netatalk/netatalk.git

git checkout branch-netatalk-2-3

cd /path/to/netatalk/clone

The paths for your SSL and BDB installations can be found by typing

brew --prefix berkeley-db

brew --prefix [email protected] or brew --prefix libressl

Compile and run

./bootstrap

./configure --disable-ddp --with-ssl-dir=/path/to/openssl/installation --with-bdb=/path/to/bdb/installation

make

Note: The --disable-ddp flag is required, since macOS doesn't have an AppleTalk network stack at the time of writing.

Install

sudo make install

Enable the launchd daemon

sudo launchctl enable system/io.netatalk.daemon
launchctl start netatalk

Underneath the hood we use a controller script called netatalkd that sets up the required environment.

To start netatalk daemons:

sudo netatalkd start

To stop netatalk daemons:

sudo netatalkd stop