An updated guide to Installing DSpace on OSX has been created. See: Install DSpace on OSX (2014)

Reference documentation: http://dspace.org/technology/system-docs/install.html

See Installing DSpace on Mac OS X for an newer, less terse version.

Notes

Start Here;

If you use the sites above, postgres and tomcat will be in the /usr/local part of your filesystem.

modify /etc/profile as follows;

# System-wide .profile for sh(1)

PATH="/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin"
export PATH

if [ "${BASH-no}" != "no" ]; then
        [ -r /etc/bashrc ] && . /etc/bashrc
fi

#For Tomcat
export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home
export CATALINA_HOME=/usr/local/tomcat

export JAVA_OPTS="-Xmx512M -Xms64M -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8"

Open a NEW terminal(so the updates to profile are available) and follow the dspace install instructions.

NOTE: The Manakin DSpace XMLUI works fine (so far), but you will have to update the context.xml to include the location of DSpace config file (dspace.cfg)