Installing Netatalk on macOS

Install Netatalk

Pre-packaged binary packages for macOS are available via the 3rd party package managers Homebrew or MacPorts.

In the case of Homebrew, issue these commands:

brew update
brew install netatalk
sudo brew services start netatalk

For building and installing from source yourself, for instance to get a newer version, follow the guides linked here.

• Installation Quick Start
• Compile Netatalk from Source

Introduction

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 to 7.5.

Homebrew

When installing Netatalk on Macs running Mojave (10.14) onwards the dependencies are easily installed using Homebrew. Refer to the Homebrew homepage for instructions how to install the package manager.

Xcode

Git and other CLI tools are required to build Netatalk from source. Homebrew will typically install this for you automatically, but if needed you can install the full Xcode package from the App Store.

Enable the launchd daemon

In case the build script didn't activate it for you, do this to make launchd to register the netatalk daemon.

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

Underneath the hood we use a controller script called netatalkd that sets up the required environment.

To start netatalk daemons:

sudo netatalkd start

To stop netatalk daemons:

sudo netatalkd stop