Setting up Snappy on Mac (High Sierra)

Hi there,

Sorry for another post, getting quite frustrated at how difficult it seems to be to install Snappy on a Mac.

I’ve managed to get jpy built and in my site-packages, I’ve also now got snappy in my site-packages. However now whenever I import snappy within python I get a dialog prompting me to install Java SE 6 even though I have Java 1.8 installed.

Any suggestions?

Snappy is pretty core to my University work and I had none of these issues on my Ubuntu machine.

Many thanks!

Apple’s Java SE 6 seems to provide secret sauce for apps that use current java versions. Apple just released a version that supports High Sierra. (https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1572). Some installers for Java applications (even those that install their own JRE) require Apple Java SE 6, so many people (me included) already have it when they install snappy.

Are you using Apple’s python? It would be interesting to know if a different Python (e.g., anaconda) avoids the
Java SE 6 dialog.

In general, vendor python (Apple, Ubuntu, etc.) is used for system scripts and doesn’t track current Python versions. Even the “official” Python.org version relies on Apple’s system libraries which are rarely updated. On macOS it is often advisable to install Python from a source (homebrew, macports, or anaconda) that also provides current versions of key libraries such as those used by python ssl. Linux LTS distros also suffer from outdated libraries, which became a problem for many users of Ubuntu 14.04 when NASA got rid of their http servers. That shouldn’t be a problem for most snappy users, but it can be a problem if you want to download data from https servers in your python scripts.

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Ah right, so you’d recommend actually installing SE 6 and that should solve things? Didn’t realise it was going to be a requisite!

I’ll give that a go, many thanks

Oh wow, that’s fixed it!

Can’t believe that that’s the reason :’)