RKWard on macOS

Status

Developer access to Mac computers is still limited for the main contributors. While RKWard is thought to work reasonably well on Mac OS X, we want to encourage you to send feedback to our mailing lists, be it success stories or bug reports, because without it is hard improve our support for this operating system in the future!

The 0.8.0 version of RKWard on Mac is known to crash during startup, occasionally, for reasons still under investigation. Please just try again. Once successfully started, RKWard should work, reliably.

Installing RKWard version 0.8.0

Requirements

Download latest official version

Installation procedure

We hope to find a way to make gatekeeper accept RKWard out of the box. Currently the installation procedure is as follows:

  1. Download the installer from on of the links above.
  2. Drag the downloaded DMG to your Desktop (or some other location on your harddrive).
  3. Right-click / Ctrl-click on the DMG, and select “Open”. Drag RKWard to Applications. When warned that “Apple cannot check it for malicious software”, click “Open”.
  4. The first time you start RKWard, you have to start it from Finder: Go to “/Applications”, right-click / ctrl-click on RKWard and select “Open”. When warned that “Apple cannot check it for malicious software”, again, click “Open”, again.
  5. On subsequent runs, you can start RKWard from Launchpad with a regular click.

Installing development snapshots

Nightly builds of RKWard are available at https://cdn.kde.org/ci-builds/education/rkward/master/macos/. These usually have the same requirements as the latest official release.

These packages are built automatically, and have not received any human testing. Back up your data before use!

Older releases that may still be of interest

Uninstalling the bundle

To uninstall RKWard, drag the app from your Applications to Trash. An uninstaller dialog should pop up and offer to remove the app completely (do a quick check that it offers to remove /opt/rkward). Alternatively, you can also run the uninstaller directly from your personal Applications folder (in your user’s home directory).

If you don’t want to use the uninstaller, you can also remove RKWard manually by following the instructions on uninstalling the MacPorts source installation.

Installing from source

Note: RKWard MacOS binaries used to be based on MacPorts. For information on that procedure, refer to an archived version of this page: http://web.archive.org/web/20210831005515/https://rkward.kde.org/RKWard_on_Mac.html.

The recommended way to build RKWard and its dependencies on Mac is to use Craft:

  1. Installing Craft on Mac: https://community.kde.org/Guidelines_and_HOWTOs/Build_from_source/Mac#Installation_using_Craft
  2. Start Craft: source ~/CraftRoot/craft/craftenv.sh
  3. Get RKWard and all dependencies: craft -i --target=master rkward (“–target=master” is optional, and means to build the development version)
  4. Create a DMG: craft --package rkward
  5. Install the DMG, don’t forget to install R, separately.

Troubleshooting

Again: Some detail or other of the above instructions is probably just wrong. If / when you get an error, please don’t give up. Send us a mail, and we will talk you through. BTW: If you figured out the remaining details all by yourself: Great! But please drop us a note as well, so we can provide more accurate instructions in the future.

RKWard crashes on start

Possible solution no. 1: Your KDE setup is probably not ready, most likely dbus is not running. Before you can start any KDE software, you first need to run the following commands once: sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.freedesktop.dbus-system.plist launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchAgents/org.freedesktop.dbus-session.plist

Possible solution no. 2: You had installed R from another source before, RKWard picks the wrong one and doesn’t find its own R package(s). If possible, remove the older R installation first.

Language is always english

Possible solution: If the LANG variable is not set in the environment RKWard is started, you will always get the english interface. To change that, e.g. into german, you can also use launchctl, before you start RKWard: launchctl setenv LANG de_DE.UTF-8 This setting takes effect immediately, but won’t survive a reboot. A more permanent solution is to set this environment variable for your user account by creating or adding to the file~/.MacOSX/environment.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>LANG</key>
    <string>de_DE.UTF-8</string>
</dict>
</plist>