Showing posts with label Install Developer Tools (XCode 4) to External Harddrive. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Install Developer Tools (XCode 4) to External Harddrive. Show all posts

Friday, March 2, 2012

Move the /Developer folder to an external usb/firewire harddrive or another partition

The installer for Xcode 4 does not allow you to switch the install locations if you just run the installer downloaded from the App Store. When it finishes installing, a directory called Developer will have been created the root of the harddrive. I own a Macbook Air with limited flash space. The developer directory is a pig and I don't really use it much on my laptop, but I wanted to install a few unix utilities from MacPorts. Here is how you do it:

Step 1: I used rsync to move the /Developer folder to my external usb harddrive. You might be able to copy it without rsync, but I used rsync + option "-a" for getting the permissions copied.
sudo rsync -az --progress /Developer /Volumes/USBDRIVE/

Step 2: I then created a symbolic link to the new folder on the usb drive.
sudo ln -s /Volumes/USBDRIVE/Developer /Developer

Step 3 (optional for MacPorts): Edit your macports.conf to include the new location of xcode. I used TextWrangler because it can handle the root access to edit the file. You could also use nano. Look for this line "developer_dir Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer" and change the path to your path.
sudo open -a TextWrangler /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf
OR
sudo nano /opt/local/etc/macports/macports.conf

ALL DONE!!!