1.  install the Xcode command line tools, it will give you gcc, make and most commandline tools. To install open terminal and type "xcode-select —install"
2. You need a few other libraries for successfully building minifi on a mac. I used brew to install the additional libraries (make,leveldb,uuid,boost ).  
   1. if you don have brew execute "/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
   2. if you already have brew make sure to update it by "brew update". if you get errors doing update check Fix brew update error section.
3. install the additional libraries
   1. brew install cmake
   2. brew install leveldb
   3. brew install ossp-uuid
   4. brew install boost
   5. brew install doxygen
4. Build minifi . Clone the Minfi-cpp git project. In context to this guide i have minifi-cpp under /opt/code/nifi-minifi-cpp
   1.  Change Directory to minifi source folder - cd /opt/code/nifi-minifi-cpp
   2. mkdir build
   3. cd build
   4. cmake ..
   5. make
   6. make package
5. You should have a tar.gz file in the build folder. Untar and run minifi by “bin/minifi.sh start”
6. Alternately you can run minifi from the /opt/code/nifi-minifi-cpp/build folder using “nohup main/minifi &”
7. If you get an error for MINIFI_HOME or ../conf, make sure there is a conf folder , with minifi.properties at the minifi root level.
   
   

Fix brew update error

1. sudo chown -R ${whoami} /usr/local - gives you ownership of /usr/local
2. cd /usr/local
3. git reset --hard FETCH_HEAD
4. git checkout Library