Install TA-Lib Without Homebrew

The only package I ever install using Homebrew is TA-Lib.

Everything else I need is already available.

TA-Lib isn’t updated often and it’s easy to install by compiling from source.

How-To

This guide will work on macOS 11.1 (Big Sur). It works perfectly on an M1 (or Intel) Mac.

First, download TA-Lib from SourceForge.

Then run:

tar xf ta-lib-0.4.0-src.tar.gz
cd ta-lib
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install

That’s all it takes.

The --prefix flag is important. macOS Big Sur doesn’t let you modify /usr even when you use sudo.

Installing the Python TA-Lib library should work fine now:

pip install TA-Lib