How to set up Mendix Studio Pro on Mac
My whole life I was Part of the PC master race. So when I got a Mac book for the first time I was at a bit of a loss on how to set up Studio pro on it. Unfortunately, right now there is no standard Mac option for Studio Pro. Luckily with the use of a virtual Machine like Parallels it turns out, it’s actually quite easy.
So, yes as you may have guessed by now there is no Mac version of Studio pro available, so for now, low coders will have to make peace with using virtual machines to run windows on their mac or Linux machines.
Theres a lot of options when it comes to running virtual machines, but because of it’s relative simplicity to setup I chose to use Parallels.
Installing and Setting up Parallels on you Mac.
It’s available from the Mac App store or you can find it on their official site linked above. Once its downloaded Simply follow the prompts to complete its installation. However if anything goes wrong or you aren’t sure about how to proceed you can always refer to this installation guide written by Parallels on how to install it from start to finish.
Its Important to note that for this to work correctly you will need the Pro version of Parallels (so you might have to pay) as well as once windows is installed on the virtual machine, you will have to activate the copy of windows 10 with a licence. You can read more about that here : activating a windows 10 licence
Configuring Port forwarding in Parallels for Mendix
Once everything is setup and working theres just a few more steps before you can install and correctly run your app in studio pro.
Here are a few steps to configure port forwarding from the Mendix documentation:
- Open the Parallels Control Center:
2. Click the gear icon to open the Configuration Panel and Navigate to the Hardware tab, and select Network from the left panel:
3. Make sure Source is set to Shared Network.
4. Make sure that both the Inbound bandwidth and Outbound bandwidth show unlimited.
If this is not the case, either enable Network Conditioner and set it to a profile that does not limit bandwidth, or click the Options tab and then the Optimization pane in order to set Resource usage to No limit.
5. In the Parallels drop-down menu, select Preferences:
6. Navigate to the Network tab, and select Shared from the left panel:
7. Click the + button and add two ports: one for 8080 and one for 8083, both forwarded to your Windows virtual machine (the 8083 port is only necessary for developing native mobile apps):
After adding those two ports, your Port forwarding rules should look like this:
Installing Studio Pro
Now you have -
- Downloaded and setup Parallels✅
- Activated your windows licence inside of the virtual machine✅
- Configured port forwarding to enable testing on local environments✅
All thats left is to install Studio pro itself and get building. For any who are brand new too Mendix, and aren’t sure how to proceed, earlier in this series I wrote a guide on how to install studio pro.
Final thoughts
Now you can have the best of both worlds, ease of navigation with Mac’s swiping features and Window’s universal compatibility. Admittedly I was skeptical before I tried it, but once its setup I give it a 10/10 as a working machine setup.
Something to keep in mind is that if you are testing a native mobile app using the Make it Native App, you might have to manually enter your virtual machines IP address for the local network instead of scanning the QR code in studio pro. However ever since I got the parallels desktop 16 update this seems to have been resolved.
If you or your company would like to request a custom How-to created just for you, Get in touch with me @Ryan M or look for me in the Mendix community slack channel
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