Administrator Install on macOS
DMG installation
An Administrator user can now install Jalview in a system location (e.g. /Applications) in a multi-user environment by opening the macOS DMG and dragging it to the Applications folder icon. This will install with all the default options for user-space updates, and users who run Jalview from here will get updates in their own userspace (in ~/Library/Application Support/Jalview-Desktop/Jalview/HASH/app, where HASH is an 8 character SHA256 hash of the app directory found in the App bundle (e.g. /Applications/Jalview.app/Contents/Resources/app hashes to ......).
Whilst this is a perfectly acceptable installation within a multi-user environment, since file associations will be made by the Info.plist found within the App bundle, there are some advantages to using the macos-install-jalview.sh script.
Script installer
The macos-install-jalview.sh script is intended for system administrators of a multi-user macOS system, or for headless installation on multiple macOS systems, and includes the option to download the latest release version of the Jalview macOS DMG file.
It should be run with sudo so that it can install in a system location (defaulting to /Applications), but this requirement can be turned off with -R.
| option | action |
|---|---|
-h |
Show help |
-d |
Download the latest DMG for the channel |
-m arch |
(with -d) Download specific JVM architecture. Should be one of ‘arm64’ or ‘x86_64’ (defaults to $(uname -m)) |
-c channel |
(with -d) Download from channel channel Should be one of ‘release’, ’test-release’, ‘develop’ (defaults to ‘release’) |
-i filename |
Use filename as DMG image file instead of downloading |
-a folder |
Install the application .app bundle in folder (defaults to /Applications) |
-v |
Verbose output |
-y |
Assume ‘yes’ for confirmation (probably needed for an automated install) |
-q |
No output other than errors. Assumes -y |
| Advanced options | |
-u template |
Use template for user-space updates path (defaults to ~/Library/Application Support/Jalview-Desktop) |
-U |
Disable user-space updates (updates will be attempted in the installation folder) |
-S |
Disable all user-space and installation updates (if you use -U you probably want this too) |
-P |
Do not add the Jalview command-line path to /etc/paths.d |
-R |
Do not perform the check for root privileges |
-t tmpdir |
Use tmpdir for installation files (defaults to /tmp) |
Examples
To download the latest release channel version of Jalview, and configure it to put user updates in /tmp/jalview_updates run:
$ ./macos-install-jalview.sh -d -u /tmp/jalview_updates/%u~/Applications folder run:
$ ./macos-install-jalview.sh -d -c develop -a ~/Applications -RUpdating the installation
Whilst users may be getting updates to Jalview, the installation will remain the same. This shouldn’t be overly problematic, but at some point a feature of the Jalview launcher (based on getdown) may require a newer version to properly handle launching Jalview from either the installation or user-space copy.
To help with this task, there is now an included update script that will use the Jalview launcher to update the installation files to the latest version of Jalview but without displaying the splash-screen and without actually launching Jalview. This means it can be run headlessly, and even automated to run periodically with e.g. cron.
The bash update script can be found in installation_folder/Jalview.app/Contents/MacOS/jalview_update so if you didn’t prevent the Jalview command-line path to be added to /etc/paths.d it can be run from a console as simply
$ sudo jalview_update
