Lithium Community SDK and macOS 10.15 Catalina

Hi All,

With the next version of macOS Catalina, apple has changed the default shell in Terminal from bash to zsh. This change will only affect new user accounts created on macOS 10.15 and later, user accounts on Macs created on earlier versions of macOS will for now continue to use bash as the default shell unless the user changes this setting.

Using the SDK with the bash shell in macOS 10.15 Catalina

If you wish to continue using the supported shell environment for the SDK in macOS where the default shell has been changed to zsh, follow the steps below to change it back to bash.

To change the default terminal shell in macOS:

1. Go to System Preferences in the Apple Menu and select Users & Groups
2. Click the padlock to unlock and enter an admin users login details.
3. Control-Click on your username in the list of users and select Advanced Options
4. From the Login Shell drop down menu ensure this is set to /bin/bash

For more information see the following Apple Support article:

https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208050 

Using the SDK with the zsh shell in macOS 10.15 Catalina

If you wish to set up the SDK on a macOS user account that has zsh set as it's default shell, and you wish to continue using zsh as your default shell in macOS, I recommend using the following steps:

Create a zshrc file in your user directory to store your user preferences by opening Terminal and then typing the following:

touch ~/.zshrc

Once you've done this, run the following command to install Node Version Manager (NVM)

curl -o- <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.34.0/install.sh" target="_blank">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.34.0/install.sh</a> | bash

We now need to check and ensure the following content is in the .zshrc file that was created above, to do this type:

pico ~/.zshrc

Check that the file displays the following lines, if not, add the following lines to the file then press CTRL+X and then Y to save the changes.

export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" # This loads nvm
[ -s "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" ] && \. "$NVM_DIR/bash_completion" # This loads nvm bash_completion

Quit and re-open Terminal to allow the changes to take effect, once you've done this enter the following command to install NodeJS v 8.3.0 which is supported by the Community SDK at the time of writing this post.

nvm install 8.3.0

Once you've got confirmation that NodeJS 8.3.0 is installed, quit and re-open Terminal again to refresh configuration.

At this point you can follow the Developer Documentation for the SDK from the Installing the SDK and dependencies section.