This has been tested on Mac OS 10.11 and later.

Get the polymake sources (either the latest release, or do a checkout of the perpetual beta, see here for links). If you used a tar ball unpack it and switch into the polymake directory. If you use the perpetual beta, switch into the directory trunk. Now issue

./configure

If you do not want to install into /usr/local (or you don't have sudo rights), then add

--prefix=$HOME/polymake-install

to configure, where '$HOME/polymake-install' can be any directory in your $HOME folder.

If you have never used java before you will get a popup window that asks you to install java. Please do so and rerun the above command.

Once this has finished do

ninja -C build/Opt install

This will take a while. If you have not specified a local directory then you will need to call this with sudo. You can pass a

-j2 

as option to use both cores for compiling. Your computer will probably become unresponsive for a while.