[Radiance-general] Radiance 5 Installation on Mac and RAYPATH properties

[Thomas Bleicher]

Hi Alireza.

Welcome to the fan club! My answers are below inline.

On Sat, Mar 19, 2016 at 6:40 PM, Alireza Hashemloo <alireh at uw.edu> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I am migrating from Windows to Mac in order to be able to complete the
> Five Phase Method Tutorial. I have never used the command line on Mac
> before. So my questions are basic. I was wondering if you could help me
> with the following questions through a step-by-step instruction if possible:
>
> OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)
>
> 1- How can I uninstall an existing Radiance installation on Mac properly?
>

That depends on how and where it was installed before. If you have a
dedicated folder like /opt/Radiance you can just delete the whole folder.
If your binaries are mixed in with others in /usr/local/bin you have to
check each file against the list of Radiance binaries and remove it.
Support files should be in /usr/local/lib/ray so that's easy to remove.

In general you don't need to worry about an old installation. The new
binaries will just replaced the old ones when installed in the same
location. If you pick a new location you just have to make sure that this
shows up first in your PATH environment variable.


> 2- How should I install Radiance on Mac?
>

You can download the binaries provided by NREL on github:
https://github.com/NREL/Radiance/releases

I hope these include all tools required for the 5 phase method. Otherwise
you might have to download Xcode and compile yourself.


> 3- How can I access my PATH and RAYPATH properties on Mac and make
> necessary adjustments for proper use of Radiance in the command line
> (Terminal)?
>

If you want to add a new directory to PATH just create a new file in
/etc/paths.d/ with the path of the new directory.

Example:

file name: /etc/paths.d/Radiance
file content: /usr/local/Radiance/bin

Unfortunately, Apple keeps messing with the way how other environment
variables are set  so the 'traditional' way via plist files does not work
in 10.10/Yosemite any more. If you want to set RAYPATH on Yosemite you can
find a solution here:

http://www.jochenhebbrecht.be/site/2015-04-14/mac/os-x-1010-yosemite-and-environment-variables

I don't have RAYPATH set in my environment and never had a problem with
that. Some of the 5-phase tools may require it, though.

Regards,
Thomas
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