PGPLOT on Mountain Lion
One of the most popular posts I made on this site was back in 2009 when I wrote about how I got the increasingly dated PGPLOT package put together by Tim Pearson running under Snow Leopard. I decided to update that entry to how I approach things today, using homebrew as a package manager under Mountain Lion. Honestly, these days I do most of my programming and plotting with Python and matplotlib, but I still have old code that needs to be run sometimes, so getting PGPLOT running under Mountain Lion allows me to keep that old software running.
- Install X11: You will need to install XQuartz in order to have XWindows support for PGPLOT. Grab the package installer and install it.
- Install Homebrew: Intall the homebrew package manager.
- Install GFORTRAN: The first thing you need to do after installing homebrew isinstall Gnu Fortran (aka gfortran). This is fairly simple. All you need to do is say:
brew install gfortran
There is a glitch here. For some reason, the home-brew version of gfortran doesn’t bother to link the gfortran libraries from/usr/local/lib
. To workaround this, symbolically linked them using:ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/gfortran/4.2.4-5666.3/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin11/4.2.1/x86_64/libgfortran.a /usr/local/lib/libgfortran.a ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/gfortran/4.2.4-5666.3/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin11/4.2.1/x86_64/libgfortranbegin.a /usr/local/lib//libgfortranbegin.a ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/gfortran/4.2.4-5666.3/lib/gcc/i686-apple-darwin11/4.2.1/x86_64/libgfortranbegin.la /usr/local/lib//libgfortranbegin.la
The exact path to the original gfortran libraries may change if you install a newer version of gfortran!
- Once they are installed, you simply have to make sure
/usr/local/bin
is in your$PATH
.
- Install PGPLOT: I grabbed the PGPLOT source code from Tim Pearson’s website (here) and untarred the tarball into
/usr/local/src/pgplot
, the default location the code expects to be in (based on the instructions in theinstall-unix.txt
file included in the source code tarball).
sudo tar -C /usr/local/src/ -xzvf pgplot pgplot5.2.tar.gz
- Install sys_macosx configuration: The PGPLOT source code has various compiler configurations stored in “configuration directories” but it doesn’t come with one for Mac OS X. I ended up hacking the
sys_macosx/
configuration directory to include a gfortran configuration. I have made a tarball of that configuration directory available in the pgplot5.2_macosx_addition.tgz that you can download and unpack into the PGPLOT source directory using:
sudo tar -C -xzvf /usr/local/src/pgplot5.2_macosx_addition.tgz
- Compile the PGPLOT binaries: At this point, if you follow the instructions in the
install-unix.txt
file in the PGPLOT directory you will be fine, baring in mind the configuration you want to use is the “maxosx gfortran_gcc” configuration. However, I will outline the steps I used below.
- Create a PGPLOT library/binary directory:Create a directory to contain the PGPLOT libraries. I created
/usr/local/pgplot
using the command:
sudo mkdir /usr/local/pgplot
- Choose the graphics drivers you want:Copy the drivers.list file from the source directory to this new pgplot directory and edit it to match your needs:
cd /usr/local/pgplot sudo cp /usr/local/src/pgplot/drivers.list . sudo vi drivers.list
(You can replace this last step with emacs or whatever text editor you prefer). You make a graphics driver part of the compilation by removing the leading exclamation point from the line. I choose to activate the X-Window drivers, the GIF drivers (to create GIF images), and the PostScript printer drivers (which you can use to create PostScript versions of plots for publication). Be aware PNG support requires libpng be installed.
- Create the makefile: We now need to create the makefile using PGPLOT’s
makemake
script. Within the/usr/local/pgplot
directory execute:
sudo /usr/local/src/pgplot/makemake /usr/local/src/pgplot macosx gfortran_gcc
which should result in the following output
Reading configuration file: /usr/local/src/pgplot/sys_macosx/gfortran_gcc.conf Selecting uncommented drivers from ./drivers.list Found drivers GIDRIV NUDRIV PSDRIV XWDRIV Creating make file: makefile Determining object file dependencies.
- Create all the binaries: Now you just have to create all the binaries, which is a simple
make
command:
sudo make
Assuming everything proceeds without error, you should then see at the end of the output
*** Finished compilation of PGPLOT *** Note that if you plan to install PGPLOT in a different directory than the current one, the following files will be needed. libpgplot.a libpgplot.dylib grfont.dat rgb.txt pgxwin_server Also note that subsequent usage of PGPLOT programs requires that the full path of the chosen installation directory be named in an environment variable named PGPLOT_DIR.
At this point, you should (if you are going to use PGPLOT within perl or C compile the C library as well using
sudo make cpg
Finally, clean out all the temporary object files, you don’t need them. Do this using the makefile by typing
sudo make clean
If you want to test if things are working you can run one of the PGPLOT demo programs created in this directory. However, thepgdemo*
executables seem hard coded to expect the pgplot libraries in the/usr/local/lib
directory, to it might be a good idea to do the following step before trying the demos.
- Link library and header files: This step is optional, but since most programs (including the
pgdemo*
executables) don’t look in/usr/local/pgplot
for library and header files, I symbolically linked the versions in the/usr/local/pgplot
directory to/usr/local/lib
and/usr/local/include
respectively using
sudo ln -s /usr/local/pgplot/libcpgplot.a /usr/local/lib/libcpgplot.a sudo ln -s /usr/local/pgplot/libpgplot.a /usr/local/lib/libpgplot.a sudo ln -s /usr/local/pgplot/libpgplot.dylib /usr/local/lib/libpgplot.dylib sudo ln -s /usr/local/pgplot/cpgplot.h /usr/local/include/cpgplot.h
- Making sure I use these PGPLOT binaries: Since I am using SciSoft OSX, I modified my
~/.tcshrc
file to change the PGPLOT related environmental variables after loading SciSoft’s environmentsetenv PGPLOT_DIR /usr/local/pgplot/
. If you are not using Scisoft, you can place these lines anywhere in your~/.tcshrc
file. If you stick to using bash, then the corresponding lines in the~/.bashrc
file that you need to create (after setting up Scisoft, if you are using that) are:export PGPLOT_DIR=/usr/local/pgplot/
At this point you have a working PGPLOT set of libraries installed.
- Installing PGPLOT support in Perl: You can stop here if you just want to use PGPLOT from C or FORTRAN source code. If you want to use PGPLOT from within Perl, you need to go further.
- Install the ExtUtils:: F77 perl module: In order to install PGPLOT support, you need to install ExtUtils:F77 first. You can download ExtUtils::F77 here and once you untar the tarball,
tar xzvf ExtUtils-F77-1.17.tar.gz
It can be easily compiled using the following standard perl module compilation steps:
cd ExtUtils-F77-1.17 perl Makefile.PL make sudo make install
- Install the PGPLOT perl module: You can download PGPLOT here. Untar the tarball.
tar xzvf PGPLOT-2.21.tar.gz
We start as we usually do for Perl modules, creating the makefile using the Makefile.PL script:
cd PGPLOT-2.21
Unfortunately, theMakefile.PL
script will create amakefile
this creates doesn’t work because it doesn’t call gfortran so we have to change theMakefile.PL
script to know about gfortran. So load Makefile.PL and edit the line that reads
use ExtUtils::F77;
to read
use ExtUtils::F77 qw{Darwin GFortran};
Once you have done that, create themakefile
using
perl Makefile.PL
Once you have done that, you can finish installing the perl module using:
make
you will see some warnings related to missing type specifiers and non-void functions. Ignore them and continue
make test sudo make install
I was able to get themake test
to work once I had the proper environmental variable settings forPGPLOT_DIR
(see step 13).
- Install the ExtUtils:: F77 perl module: In order to install PGPLOT support, you need to install ExtUtils:F77 first. You can download ExtUtils::F77 here and once you untar the tarball,
So that is it, I now have working PGPLOT installations with perl support on my Mountain Lion Macs.