After messing with some of Twitter’s Bootstrap files locally, I decided it was time to get a build environment established on my Mac. It quickly became apparent that there wasn’t a whole lot of guidance on setting up the build environment in OS X; so i’ve posted my efforts here so that someone in my shoes can follow these steps:

Step 1: Install Node (and Node Package Manager)
Visit http://nodejs.org/ and download the installer for OS X (Lazylink: http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.8.12/node-v0.8.12.pkg)

Step 2: Clone and build Less.js
Install Less.js via folowing command (Assumes GIT CL Tools is installed):
git clone git://github.com/cloudhead/less.js.git

Next, go to the less.js directory, type: ‘make’.

Then copy the install directory to /usr/local/less.js

Add ‘export PATH=$HOME/local/less.js/bin:$PATH’ to ~/.bash_profile:

Open a terminal and type:

touch ~/.bash_profile; open ~/.bash_profile

Paste following in:

export PATH=$HOME/local/less.js/bin:$PATH

and save…

Step 3: Install Bootstrap Dependencies
Twitter Bootstrap depends on a number of packages; you can install all of them by using the following command with NPM:

npm install uglify-js less jshint recess -g

Step 4: clone and make Twitter Bootstrap
Clone Bootstrap:
git clone git://github.com/twitter/bootstrap.git

Go to the bootstrap directory, type: ‘make’.
Built files are output in the ‘docs’ directory…

Enjoy!