Setup Ghetto Skype on Mac?

Ghetto Skype is an open source desktop application powered by Electron which acts as the wrapper for the Web Skype beta that Microsoft has been working on. A quote from the Ghetto Skype README.md file:

Are you tired of a buggy 32 bit official Skype client? Then Ghetto Skype is for you!

Install Homebrew if you don’t have it already

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Once Homebrew is done installing, you will need wget (Will need this CLI tool later)

brew install wget

Now install NVM so that we can install Node.js

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/creationix/nvm/v0.33.0/install.sh | bash

You will need to install the stable version of Node.js via NVM

nvm install stable

We need to download the latest version source code from the Github Repo of Ghetto Skype

wget https://github.com/stanfieldr/ghetto-skype/archive/v1.5.0.zip

NOTE: You can check what the latest versions of Ghetto Skype are on it’s releases page

Unzip the new archive, delete the zip, and move into the unziped folder

unzip v1.5.0.zip && rm v1.5.0.zip && cd ghetto-skype-1.5.0

Install all required Node.js modules

npm install

Build the package

npm run dist

Open up the dist/mac dir in finder

open dist/mac

Now, you should see a .app and a .dmg for Ghetto Skype

You can either drag the .app file to your Applications folder, or open the .dmg file and do as you would with any other .dmg installer

Conclusion

Sometimes (Most of the time) the open source community can do a lot with very limited resources

If you are interested in the Electron framework for creating desktop applications with web technology, then visit their Github page