MCEdit is an open-source, BSD-licenced world editor for the viral indie hit Minecraft.

MCEdit is written in Python using a variety of open source modules. When developing it is recommended to use virtualenv to keep dependencies sane and for easy deployment.

You'll need Python 2.6+ and easy_install/pip at a minimum before getting started. This quick guide assumes a unix-y OS.

Clone MCEdit:

git clone https://github.com/mcedit/mcedit
cd mcedit
git submodule init
git submodule update

Optionally (but highly recommended), setup and activate virtualenv. virtualenv will simplify development by creating an isolated and barebones Python environment. Anything you install while virtualenv is active won't affect your system-wide Python installation, for example.

easy_install virtualenv
virtualenv ENV
. ENV/bin/activate

Install various dependencies. This may take a bit (especially numpy). If installing pygame errors, try installing from a binary packages or following one of the guides from that page to install from source.

easy_install PyOpenGL
easy_install numpy
easy_install pygame
easy_install pyyaml

You should now be able to run MCEdit with python mcedit.py assuming you've installed all the dependencies correctly.

"Freezing" Python applications to deploy them for use by non-technical users is not in any way fun, expect errors and edge cases.

Additional dependencies are required to package MCEdit. Regardless of which platform you're targetting, esky will be required.

Note: These instructions have only been tested on OS X Lion.

You will run into errors attempting to use the system Python when packaging anything under OS X. The easiest way to install a new Python is by using Homebrew.

If you were using the system python while developing and using virtualenv, you'll need to overwrite it with your newly installed version.

brew install python
virtualenv -p /usr/local/bin/python ENV

easy_install esky
easy_install py2app
python setup.py bdist_esky

This will leave you with a zip file in dist/ that contains a portable .app bundle.