Install and Configure wget on macOS Sierra 10.12 and fix SSL GNUTLS error

MacOS Sierra and Yosemite comes with the command line utility called ‘curl‘ which is a network transfer tool, it does not come with the popular ‘wget‘, in fact, ‘curl‘ can probably get you by just fine, check man curl at the command line to see its usage.

Otherwise, let’s look at getting ‘wget‘… this can be done in 3 ways.

1 – Install as Point and Click

Download and run the package from Rudix

2 – Compile from Source

To add and install wget to your system you need to download the source files, compile the code and make an install. To actually compile the code you need a compiler, unfortunately, it doesn’t come with OS X by default you need to install the free xcode suite from Apple which includes the GCC compiler. This process also works exactly the same inYosemite and older versions.

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Get Xcode

Get Xcode if you don’t have Xcode already installed. I’m not going to show you how to install it because i already have one.

Next you need to install the Xcode command line tools, easiest way to do so by running in the Terminal:

xcode-select --install

Using curl to get wget

Get the latest wget source code from the ftp repository, or using curl from the command line:

cd ~/Downloads

curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/wget-1.15.tar.gz

Extract it and move into it

tar -zxvf wget-1.15.tar.gz

cd wget-1.15/

Configure and Install it

./configure

an error may occur on SSL…

configure: error: –with-ssl was given, but GNUTLS is not available.
wget needs to have some type of SSL support GNUTLS is most probably not available on your OS X system – if so use OpenSSL in the configure as an alternative use so re-run the configure with an SSL flag:

./configure --with-ssl=openssl

make

sudo make install

Thats it done, wget will be installed in:

/usr/local/bin/wget

Clean Up

Remove the source code and compressed file:

rm -rf ~/Downloads/wget*

Test wget

cd ~/Downloads

wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/wget-1.15.tar.gz

Everything should work out fine – if you need to install more Unix style tools it will be faster and better to install a Package Manager for OSX like Homebrew – it makes installing and maintaining these applications so easy,