Installing & Using Zowe Clients on a New macOS

My Windows machine battery was expanding…

{Core} Recently I “upgraded” my workstation from Windows to macOS. Below are the steps I took to obtain a fresh install of The Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe Clients (Zowe CLI & Zowe Explorer) and setup my new machine.

Homebrew

The first software I installed was Homebrew (“The Missing Package Manager for macOS”). The install of Homebrew is simple: you run a command and follow interactive prompts:

Thanks Joe Winchester for provding the install gif!

VS Code, Hyper, & fnm

With Homebrew installed, I added other needed dependencies:

• VS Code (for Zowe Explorer) — brew install — cask visual-studio-code
• Hyper (cool terminal for Zowe CLI) — brew install — cask hyper
• fnm (Node.js version manager, “faster” alternative to nvm) — brew install fnm

Note: Hyper is purely an aesthetic improvement for using Zowe CLI & fnm helps avoid permission errors you may get when installing zowe CLI on your machine

If following along, you’ll likely need to add these lines to your ~/.zprofile or ~/.zshrc to complete the setup:

export PATH=/home/$USER/.fnm:$PATH
eval "$(fnm env --use-on-cd --version-file-strategy=recursive)"

Once you install an application with Homebrew, you can typical run it from macOS launchpad:

Visual Studio Code in Launchpad after Homebrew install

Node.js

Install Node.js with fnm install --lts and verify:

Zowe CLI

Run npm install -g @zowe/cli to install Zowe CLI and enable the daemon:

Zowe Explorer

Go here and click the Install button (potentially twice if VS Code is not open when you first click it):

Team Config

Create a team config and run a zowe command:

Using Zowe CLI

Lastly, you can access z/OS data sets (jobs and z/OS Unix files) wth Zowe Explorer. You may be prompted to unlock macOS Keychain to extract your securely stored, mainframe credentials:

After inputing macOS credentials and selecting “Always allow”, you can use Zowe Explorer:

Using Zowe Explorer

Summary

From beginning to end, it takes ~30 minutes to be up in running with Zowe CLI and Zowe Explorer on the new macOS with plenty of interruptions .

If you enjoyed this blog checkout more Zowe blogs here. Or, ask a question and join the conversation on the Open Mainframe Project Slack Channel #Zowe-help, #Zowe-announcements or #Zowe-onboarding. If this is your first time using the Open Mainframe slack channel register here.