Getting Started - For Mac OS X Users

Owned by Gabrielle Garonzik
Jul 24, 2019
2 min read

This section provides installation details relevant to Mac OS X Users.

MetaEd is built and tested for Windows because a large majority of the Ed-Fi Community uses Windows. However, the libraries and technologies we chose are cross-platform and therefore should support Mac OS X users as well. The following documentation has been provided by the Ed-Fi Community to assist OS X users in downloading and installing the MetaEd IDE on a Mac.

Installation Tips for OS X Users

Standard Installation

To install the MetaEd IDE (see Getting Started - Download & Installation, starting at Step 7), open Homebrew and type the following command:

brew cask install atom && ln -s /Applications/Atom.app/Contents/Resources/app/apm/bin/apm /usr/local/bin/apm && cd MetaEd-IDE && yarn install

This modified brew install addresses an installation issue with OS X in which the Atom Package Manager (apm) does not get exposed when MetaEd IDE is installed. Here, that binary is exposed on the PATH. The second command in the chain above creates a soft link in the user's local executable directory that will be recognized by the command line.

Alternate Scripted Installation

As alternative installation path for Mac OS X: assuming users already have Homebrew installed, the installation process.

  • Installs node if not already installed.

    brew install node

  • Installs yarn if not already installed.

    brew install yarn

  • Installs the Atom text editor if not already installed.

    brew cask install atom

  • Generates the soft link to the apm executable and puts it on the path with the same command name.

    ln -s /Applications/Atom.app/Contents/Resources/app/apm/bin/apm /usr/local/bin/apm

  • Installs MetaEd IDE when called from the MetaEd IDE subdirectory. 

    yarn install

If repeated or multiple installations are useful, this sequence could be transformed into an installer script (i.e., installer.sh) and included in a ZIP file distributable in #!/bin/bash.

Getting Started Documentation Contents

Find out more about how to begin using MetaEd: