Building CASA on OS X

CASA has many third-party dependencies. These dependencies could be satisfied in a number of different ways, but CASA developers generally use MacPorts. This is the route described here.

Installing Third-Party Dependencies

CASA depends on a number of third-party packages. The CASA project provides a binary download to get the third-party dependencies upon which CASA depends. This includes all of the packages needed to build CASA on supported versions of OS X. While you can build the dependencies yourself, we use an unreleased version of PGPLOT, and we are not permitted to distribute the source code for it. CASA may work without having the modifications found in our version, but it could also be that the CASA Viewer may not behave completely right or may fail to compile. The Viewer is the only major component of CASA that depends on PGPLOT. This section includes a description of how to install these dependencies with MacPorts.

Installing CASA's Binary Distribution of Dependencies

The binary distribution of CASA's third-party dependencies can be obtained from the CASA OS X Developers Download Area. Select the right OS X version number and then download the newest version of the third-party package distribution. As root cd to the top directory (/) and untar the distribution you downloaded. This will install these packages into /opt/casa/01.

Installing MacPorts
MacPorts can be installed in any manner you like. However, CASA requires some special versions of some packages. These special versions could be older versions than currently in use (e.g. matplotlib) or they may include newer version than currently in use (e.g. PGPLOT). In either case, the CASA Portfile tree is overlaid on the standard MacPorts tree. _If you have any of these special packages already installed from MacPorts, you will have to uninstall them prior to beginning this process of building CASA.

Xcode
Download the right version of Xcode from the Apple Store, install it, and accept the EULA by running: xcodebuild -license. Next install the Xcode Command Line Tools.

Install MacPorts

-- DarrellSchiebel - 2015-03-13
Topic revision: r3 - 2015-03-13, DarrellSchiebel
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