Information about building Ferret on Mac OS X using the Homebrew package manager to install required packages. If you do not have Homebrew installed, see https://brew.sh/ for information on installing and using Homebrew.
Ferret on Mac OS X requires X-Windows X11 support for displayed plots.
We have found that XQuartz (free software) works well.
See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201341 and https://www.xquartz.org/
for more information.
The platform_specific.mk.intel-mac configuration file assumes the required
X11 include files and libraries are located where XQuartz installs them
(under /opt/X11/).
Make sure you have the Xcode application installed (available for free from
the Apple App Store application), and have run xcode-select --install to
add the command-line developer tools.
Also make sure the bin subdirectory of the Homebrew package installation
directory (/usr/local/bin is the default) is in your PATH environment
variable, for example:
export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"
Install the gcc, readline, hdf5, and netcdf Homebrew packages.
brew install gcc
brew install readline
brew install hdf5
brew install netcdf
Obtain the Ferret source code from GitHub.
You could just download the source code zip or tar.gz file for a Ferret release
from https://github.com/NOAA-PMEL/Ferret/releases/ and extract it to the desired
parent directory for building Ferret.
Or, if you are familiar with git, you can clone the Ferret repository to build
from the latest development code:
git clone https://github.com/NOAA-PMEL/Ferret.git $HOME/git/Ferret
cd $HOME/git/Ferret
Working with a cloned repository allows you to quickly and easily update and rebuild Ferret when updates appear that you wish to use. (If you wish to help with Ferret development, fork the NOAA-PMEL/Ferret repository to a repository under your own GitHub account and then clone your copy of the repository to your local system.)
In the Ferret source directory, copy the site_specific.mk.in configuration
template file to site_specific.mk and edit this site_specific.mk configuration
file appropriately for your system; for example:
DIR_PREFIX = $(HOME)/git/Ferret (wherever you cloned or copied the Ferret source)
BUILDTYPE = intel-mac
INSTALL_FER_DIR = /usr/local/Ferret-7.4 (wherever you want Ferret installed)
CC = $(shell which clang)
FC = $(shell which gfortran)
HDF5_LIBDIR =
SZ_LIBDIR =
NETCDF_LIBDIR = /usr/local/lib (wherever Homebrew put its netcdf library)
READLINE_LIBDIR = /usr/local/Cellar/readline/8.0.4/lib (wherever Homebrew put its hidden readline library)
Similarly, copy external_functions/ef_utility/site_specific.mk.in to
external_functions/ef_utility/site_specific.mk and edit
external_functions/ef_utility/site_specific.mk:
BUILDTYPE = intel-mac
CC = $(shell which clang)
FC = $(shell which gfortran)
LD = $(shell which gfortran)
Build Ferret and install it in the location given by INSTALL_FER_DIR:
make
make install
At this point you are now where one would be if you had downloaded and extracted
a prebuilt Ferret tar file to the Ferret installation directory.
Run the Finstall script under the bin subdirectory of the Ferret installation
directory to create the ferret_paths scripts for setting environment variables
needed by Ferret.
To run the benchmark tests, the nco, imagemagick, and gs Homebrew packages
are needed.
brew install nco
brew install imagemagick
brew install gs
Make sure the environment variables need by Ferret are assigned appropriately
using the appropriate ferret_paths script, and that the command which ferret
returns the path to the version of Ferret that you wish to test.
Change to the bench subdirectory of the Ferret source directory, and run
make check or make check_noremote (to skip tests using data from remote sites).
These tests will generate image files as well as all_..._log (normal output),
all_..._err (error output), and all_..._ncdump (human-readable versions of
the created NetCDF files) output files.
These files are then compared to similar files under the test_results
subdirectory to create differences files.
Any actual differences in the GIF images are show in bright red (overlaid on a faded original image) in any *_diff.png images created. There usually are difference image files, but rarely do they show any actual differences (so just the faded original image with no bright red). Differences in the log, err, and ncdump output files are shown in the *.diff files, which might be empty, or might show negligable numerical differences and insignificant differences in system syntax.