Is there a fix or workaround for El Capitan breaking EnergyPlus?

asked 2016-01-11 04:31:02 -0600

Jamie Bull

flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

5072 ●6 ●28 http://oco-carbon.com/

updated 2016-01-11 11:24:57 -0600

__AmirRoth__

4446 ●5 ●17 http://bleedinggreenna...

I'm not a Mac user myself, but I've now had a couple of people ask me about EnergyPlus failing to run under El Capitan.

It seems like it's related to EnergyPlus putting files in /usr/bin and El Capitan no longer allowing that (the "rootless" / System Integrity Protection feature).

Is there a fix/workaround available for this?

This is a particular concern for me as I'm trying to get Eppy's wrapper for the EnergyPlus CLI working cross-platform and want to know if there is either a solution I can add to the wrapper, or at least what I need to add to the documentation so that Mac users can fix the issue for themselves.

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answered 2016-01-11 07:16:25 -0600

MarkAdams
1845 ●2 ●9 https://github.com/mbadams5

Another workaround is to use the Command Line Interface (CLI), present since EnergyPlus 8.3. This is also the preferred method to invoke EnergyPlus.

To see all the command line options run /Applications/EnergyPlus-8-3-0/energyplus -h

For a typical simulation:

/Applications/EnergyPlus-8-4-0/energyplus -w /Applications/EnergyPlus-8-4-0/WeatherData/USA_IL_Chicago-OHare.Intl.AP.725300_TMY3.epw /Applications/EnergyPlus-8-4-0/ExampleFiles/RefBldgMediumOfficeNew2004_Chicago.idf

I have also created an EnergyPlus issue.

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Great. Sounds like we won't have any trouble with Eppy then as this is what we do already.

Jamie Bull ( 2016-01-11 08:01:01 -0600 )edit

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answered 2016-01-11 06:49:07 -0600

Jamie Bull

5072 ●6 ●28 http://oco-carbon.com/

updated 2016-05-17 18:27:41 -0600

This is a far-from-ideal workaround from one of the people having difficulties:

I think I’ve found a work around now which came from a related problem someone posted about on unmethours a while back [this one?], so it doesn’t come up if you search for El Capitan.

I think there is probably a much more elegant solution but I am currently running it from the application folder using terminal with some extra steps below:

1) Edited the runenergyplus file to comment out the lines which tell it to delete some files after running (otherwise it runs the first time but not again as it can’t then find the files)

#Delete additional files
#for filename in $LINK_NAMES Energy+.ini eplusout.end;
#do
#  if [ -f $filename ]; then
#    rm $filename
#  fi
#done

2) Set the environment variable before running:

export ENERGYPLUS_DIR=/Applications/EnergyPlus-8-3-0

3) Run the file from terminal specifying the locations:

"/Applications/EnergyPlus-8-3-0/runenergyplus" "/Applications/EnergyPlus-8-3-0/modelrun16010501.idf" “GBR_LONDON_GATWICK_IWEC.epw"

This is all very clumsy and I am sure that a bit more judicious editing of the runenergyplus script would be a better answer but I don’t really have the time or skills to do that and this seems to be working.

As the user says, there must be a better solution than this!