Installing Netatalk 3 on macOS

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 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)"

Then install the dependencies:

brew install berkeley-db libtool automake autoconf libevent libgcrypt mysql openssl@1.1 libressl pkg-config

Then clone the Netatalk repository and cd to that folder:

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

cd /path/to/netatalk/clone

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

brew --prefix berkeley-db

brew --prefix openssl@1.1 or brew --prefix libressl

To compile run the following commands:

./bootstrap

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

If ./configure fails because it can't find libevent, you may need to export the path to libevent's pkgconfig:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/libevent/lib/pkgconfig"

make

To install:

sudo make install

To enable the launchd daemon

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