www.messagepad.org: Building FreeCAD with Conda and Mamba on macOS (Geeks

Geeks: Example

32:64

Thu, Sep 20th, 2022

Building FreeCAD from source using Conda

Building FreeCAD for development on macOS Monterey for M1

There are currently two methods to build FreeCAD. The Homebrew script on https://github.com/FreeCAD/homebrew-freecad is well documented and works, although with a few quirks. It does not currently create a working macOS Bundle though, and it does not easily work with a local source tree.

The official ARM64 Bundle is built using Conda. Conda, like Homebrew, installs FreeCAD dependencies before launching CMake. The dependencies, build instructions, and "feedstock" live in https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD_Conda .

Unfortunately I don't know much about Conda, but if I want to get any development for macOS done, I will have to find a way to build the latest release including my changes from a local source tree, so here is my step-by-step report.

Conda Step by Step

First we remove Homebrew:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/uninstall.sh)"

And a previous attempt to install Conda:

conda install anaconda-clean
anaconda-clean
anaconda-clean --yes
rm -r ~/miniconda3

And remove Conda reference in `~/.bash_profile`

Now off to installing what we need from scratch. Xcode is obviously needed. Xcode command line tools are installed next:

xcode-select --install
xcode-select -p

Next, we want a fresh install of what the Conda developers call MiniConda. Go to https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html and download the shell script "Miniconda3 macOS Apple M1 64-bit bash"

bash -b ~/Downloads/Miniconda3-latest-MacOSX-arm64.sh

For some reason, Conda did not bother to add its path to .bashrc, so we call:

conda init bash

And since I am using ~/.bashrc, I have to append the content of ~/.bash_profile and delete ~/.bash_profile

Restart the terminal or modify the path manually.

We disable the default Conda environment when launching a shell:

conda config --set auto_activate_base false

But we can re-enable it any time by calling:

conda activate base

Three ways to choose from

(And they are all more or less wrong)

1: https://makewithtech.com/freecad-pre-releases-on-macos/

conda update --all
conda create --name fcenv --channel conda-forge freecad

(Condo-forge, is that pointing to GitHub: https://github.com/conda-forge/freecad-feedstock ? There is also https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD_Conda)

Fails with "packages are not available"

2: https://vectronic.io/posts/building-freecad-on-macos-big-sur/

conda install python=3.10
conda install -c freecad/label/dev freecad -y

Fills with wrong Python version 3.10 3: https://wiki.freecadweb.org/Conda

conda config --add channels conda-forge
conda create --name fcenv-dev --channel freecad/label/dev freecad
conda activate fcenv-dev
conda update freecad
freecad
conda deactivate

This works great in creating an ARM64 binary with all dependencies, HTML views, and no script errors at startup. However, it does not create a Bundle, and it doesn't build from a local source tree.

The Bundle seems to be created via CI here: https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-Bundle , but we have to check if that runs locally without too many changes.

CI calls "brew update" for macOS which we don't use if I see that correctly. The rest happens in "conda/osx-arm64/create_bundle.sh" which links back up the tree into other scripts.

On to build the Bundle

We will need the package manager "Mamba" to create the Bundle.

conda activate base
conda install mamba -n base -c conda-forge
conda activate fcenv-dev

So I clone the FreeCAD-Bundle repo (actually, I forked it and cloned my own version because I may want to create a Pull Request later).

git clone https://github.com/MatthiasWM/FreeCAD-Bundle.git
# Or
git clone https://github.com/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-Bundle.git
cd FreeCAD-Bundle/conda/osx-arm64
./create_bundle.sh

And let it run for about 10 minutes (MacBook Pro M1), and without any further intervention, I actually get the disk image which contains a full and fresh version of FreeCAD. Wow!

NOTE: the bundle is built in place and the icon files are renamed, so the bundle can not be built twice from the same FreeCAD-Bundle unless those files are restored:

git restore APP/FreeCAD.app/Contents/Resources/freecad-doc.icns
git restore APP/FreeCAD.app/Contents/Resources/freecad.icns
git restore APP/FreeCAD.app/Contents/Resources/qt.conf

So, um, we have solved the issue of getting a working macOS ARM64 Bundle. Now we need to find out how to build the bundle form a local source tree... .

Late to the party

It ssems that the whole Conda setup does not build from source, but instead just downloads binaries. It's possible though. Find the correct `meta.yaml` file and call `conda build` on that folder.

conda install conda-build
conda build -c conda-forge --debug --no-test /Users/matt/miniconda3/pkgs/freecad-0.21.pre-py310h69569d2_38/info/recipe/
# or whatever your path ist

Also check out :

/Users/matt/miniconda3/pkgs/freecad-0.21.pre-py310h69569d2_38/info/recipe/meta.yaml

which may solve our issue with building from a local source tree, but it does not build our QuickLook plugin or the Bundle, so no real testing here either.

BTW, if tthe command above fails with:

CMake Error at cMake/FreeCAD_Helpers/SetupCoin3D.cmake:25 (file):
  file failed to open for reading (Not a directory):
    /Library/Frameworks/Inventor.framework/Inventor/C/basic.h

Then a previous system-wide installation of Inventor is in the way. We can fix that temporarily by doing

sudo mv /Library/Frameworks/Inventor.framework /Library/Frameworks/Inventor.framework.bak
# don't forget to undo

So we do get the binary and a subfolder structure in `...conda.../fcenv-dev/pkgs/freecad-0.21.pre-py310h69569d2_38/bin/freecad, but it can't find python 3.10 or Qt. Sigh.

Using Conda And Mamba

Trying to teach the package manager Mamba to use the local freecad archive instead of pulling it from GitHub, I created `/Users/matt/dev/FreeCAD/FreeCAD-Bundle/conda/osx-arm64/create_local_bundle.sh` which adds `-c /Users/matt/miniconda3/envs/fcenv-dev/conda-bld/osx-arm64/` as the first `-c` argument in `mambe create ...`.

The good thing is, that we end up with a working package. If that was built using our local Conda setup still must be tested.

In `/Users/matt/miniconda3/pkgs/freecad-0.21.pre-py310h69569d2_38/info/recipe/meta.yaml` in the `source: section, we comment out the lines for `url:` and `fn:` and add ` path: /Users/matt/dev/FreeCAD/FreeCAD` instead. We should now be able to build FC using the local source tree:

conda build --no-test --debug --no-anaconda-upload  /Users/matt/miniconda3/pkgs/freecad-0.21.pre-py310h69569d2_38/info/recipe/

And YES, this works! I can build macOS Bundles from a local source tree!