Install uLibTidy on Mac OS X

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I’ve had some issues getting LibTidy and uTidyLib (Python wrapper) installed and figured I would post my solution as I saw zero Google results on this.

The error I kept getting was:

OSError: Couldn’t find libtidy, please make sure it is installed.

Here’s how I found how to get around this, if you have a better solution please post in comments.

First install LibTidy from source:

cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@tidy.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/tidy co -P tidy
cd tidy
sh build/gnuauto/setup.sh
./configure
make && sudo make install


This places LibTidy in /usr/local/lib. Unfortunately uLibTidy doesn’t recognize the generated library. A simple symlink will fix the problem:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/lib/libtidy.dylib /usr/local/lib/libtidy.so

Now uLibTidy is able to find LibTidy:

In [1]: import tidy

Good luck! If you’re still having issues make sure /usr/local/lib is in your $PATH environment variable.