Create a MacOS X App Bundle Using Homebrew

This page is outdated (October 2019). For more recent information, see Octave for macOS.

Introduction

This tutorial explains how to build Octave.app (version >4) using Homebrew. It is recommended that users either

• download Octave 4.0.2 with graphical user interface (OS X 10.9+),
• download Octave 4.0.2 with command line interface (OS X 10.9+)

Prerequisites

• Install Xcode via the Mac App Store.
• Install the command line tools by xcode-select --install.
• Optional: install XQuartz, e.g. if you want to use Gnuplot with X11 backend.

Creating the App Bundle and Disk Image

The script "install_octave.sh" from the github repository

https://github.com/schoeps/octave_installer

will ask some questions, e.g. regarding the installation path (/Applications/Octave.app is recommended) or whether Octave should be compiled with or without graphical user interface and finally whether a disk image should be created or not. If you choose to install to the Applications folder then the script needs to run with administration rights.

The script installs all necessary dependencies of octave via homebrew; it's using openblas instead of Apple's native implementation.

Known limitations

• Plotting should work with Gnuplot and Qt graphic toolkits. However, sometimes it takes a long time to initialize.
• the application bundle is not relocatable (must be placed in the /Applications directory).
• [ctrl]+c crashes the GUI, cf. Bug 37672.