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Memcached seems to be preinstalled with Xcode on OS X, according to Apple's documentation. To make sure I'm not hallucinating, I checked Apple's developer tools documentation. Yes, memcached is supported and documented by Apple:

Apple Developer Library : memcached(1)

Apparently, memcached is installed with Xcode since at least 10.6 onwards.

The reason I'm asking this is that on the Web and on SO there are lots people asking how to install memcached on OS X but curiously no one seems to mention that the easiest way to do so is to simply install Xcode via the AppStore (or using a DMG). All the answers given involves using homebrew or some other complicated way to install memcached from source.

Is there any compelling reason why the Apple shipped memcached is not good enough? I don't see any advantages of compiling and installing memcached from source since there's an Apple supported version.

Michael Hampton
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GeneQ
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  • I'm not sure it is the easiest way. Naturally it depends on your familiarity with build tools. – Michael Aug 28 '12 at 06:32
  • You can ask this question for any of the dozen items shipped with XCode. I'd argue that Apple's support version is usually outdated. Current stable memcached is [1.4.14](http://code.google.com/p/memcached/wiki/ReleaseNotes1414) – emcconville Aug 28 '12 at 20:14
  • I'm a developer without the luxury of having a sysadmin to figure this out for me. Got to do it myself. But at least with SF I get to ask some of the best sysadmins in the world for advice. My question was migrated from SO. I'm not sure why this question got down-voted though. It's not that I didn't do research before asking. Just saying. – GeneQ Aug 29 '12 at 15:06
  • @Michael, thanks for rephrasing the question. You read my mind. That's was exactly what I wanted to ask. – GeneQ Aug 29 '12 at 15:08

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If (and that's a very big if) I'm going to deploy a Mac OS X Server in production, installing all of Xcode just to get memcached doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if there's an easy way to just get the components I need.

As a system administrator, I want only the components I need to deploy the application/service that the server is supposed to be running, and nothing else. All else is either an unnecessary waste of disk space or a potential security problem or both, and having unnecessary things on the server increases my workload.

For a development machine, it's more or less fine, though, especially if you have to install a bunch of things to try several approaches to a problem. (Just clean up after your failed experiments...)

All that said, I've never deployed Mac OS X Server into production for anything, and I don't expect to do so at any time in the foreseeable future.

Michael Hampton
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