Licensing IDL on PPPL Mac's

Installing and Licensing IDL on PPPL Mac's

To run IDL directly on a MacOS-X system with its own licence, follow the steps below. Since a licence is "checked out" from the PPPL License Manager, this will not work from offsite without firewall authentication.

Download and install IDL from L3Harris. (Get the latest "Native" version for your Mac's architecture.) You will need to establish an account and password. Alternately, you may find a recent version on P:\software\Macintosh\Lab-Soft\Applications\IDL.
Note that it is not necessary to install a local license file, as long as you are at PPPL, or can connect via VPN. If you prefer to have a local license, refer to Knowledge Base article KB0010213 help.pppl.gov
If you choose to install 8.7, you can skip down to the bullet 'Starting with ....'
From a MacOS-X interactive shell, do the following: (this assumes IDL resides in your Applications/exelis/idl folder)
If using the tcsh shell, add the following lines to your .cshrc file in your home directory on your computer:
```
source /Applications/harris/idl/bin/idl_setup
setenv LM_LICENSE_FILE 27000@license.pppl.gov:27001@license.pppl.gov
```
If using the bash shell, add the following lines to your .bashrc file in your home directory on your computer
```
# IDL license when on the PPPL network:
export LM_LICENSE_FILE=27000@license.pppl.gov:27001@license.pppl.gov
# define paths for IDL:
source /Applications/harris/idl/bin/idl_setup.bash
```
Run idl from its default installation directory and verify there are no license errors:
```
/Applications/harris/idl/bin/idl
```
As always with IDL, make sure your IDL_PATH variable looks in the directories you have placed any personal code.

Starting with IDL Version 8.7, you can connect to a port to access the license server. Just put this link - http://license.pppl.gov:7070/fne/bin/capability in a file titled o_licenseserverurl.txt in directory
```
/Applications/harris/o_licenseserverurl.txt
```
on your Macintosh

If you would like to also install MDSplus directly on your Mac (although this is not necessary if you run IDL on the Linux cluster), you can get installation packages for your Intel Mac at PPPL, at www.mdsplus.org.

You can test IDL access to MDSplus (assuming you have MDSplus installed on your Mac) by:

IDL> mdsconnect, 'skylark.pppl.gov:8501'
IDL> mdsopen, 'wf', 130000
IDL> plot, mdsvalue('\ip')

If you have additional questions, please send email to efredrickson or rbell or

Installing and Licensing IDL on PPPL Mac's

Edited 17-Sept-2019 by: Gretchen Zimmer