Install from Source (macOS)

These instructions outline how to install an all in one Opencast system on the macOS operating system. Tested on OS X 10.14.1 Mojave.

The installation on macOS is not officially supported. Use this at your own risk.

Preparation

Open a Terminal and switch to the directory, in which the Opencast installation should be placed, e.g. /opt/, ~/develop/ or whatever you prefer.

Get Opencast source

You can get the Opencast source code by either downloading a tarball of the source code or by cloning the Git repository. The latter option is more flexible, it is easier to upgrade and in general preferred for developers. The prior option, the tarball download, needs less tools and you don't have to download nearly as much as with Git.

Cloning the Git repository:

git clone https://github.com/opencast/opencast.git
cd opencast
git tag   <-  List all available versions
git checkout TAG   <-  Switch to desired version

Using the tarball:

Select the tarball for the version you want to install from the GitHub releases section under the "Tags" tab and download it directly from there or with the curl command specified below.

# Download desired tarball, replace [...] with the desired version
curl -OL https://github.com/opencast/opencast/archive/[...].tar.gz
tar xf [...].tar.gz

Install Dependencies

Please make sure to install the following dependencies.

Required:

Xcode
jdk 11
ffmpeg >= 3.2.4
maven >= 3.6
python >= 2.6
Firefox or Chrome

(If you are using jEnv to set up your environment, make sure to enable the maven plugin .)

Required (not necessarily on the same machine):

Elasticsearch 7.9.x

Required for text extraction:

tesseract >= 3

Required for hunspell based text filtering:

hunspell >= 1.2.8

Required for audio normalization:

sox >= 14.4 (with MP3, FLAC and OGG support)

Required for animate service:

synfig

Dependency Download

You can download Xcode in the Mac App Store. JDK 8 for OS X is available from Oracle.

Using Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager for OS X. For installation instruction see their website.

brew install maven
brew install ffmpeg

brew install tesseract
brew install hunspell
brew install sox
brew install synfig

Elasticsearch on macOS

If you want to install Elasticsearch in the same machine run Elasticsearch as a Docker container

docker run -d --name elasticsearch -p 9200:9200 -p 9300:9300 -e 'discovery.type=single-node' elasticsearch:7.9.3

Using pre-built binaries

Pre-built versions of most dependencies can be downloaded from the respective project website:

Building Opencast

Switch to the opencast folder. If you downloaded the tarball, this is the folder you just unpacked (called something like opencast-community-opencast-[…]). If you chose to download via git, use cd opencast. You can proceed by building opencast (depending on the folder permissions, you might need to start the command with sudo):

mvn clean install -Pdev

Please be patient, as building Opencast for the first time will take quite long.

Configure

Please follow the steps of the Basic Configuration guide. It will help you to set your host name, login information, etc. Be aware that the config files now reside in the build folders for the desired distribution. For the all-in-one distribution, this would be /your/path/to/opencast/build/opencast-dist-allinone-[…]/etc/, again with […] representing the selected version.

ffprobe is used to analyze new videos. It is installed with FFmpeg but usually not on the path to be automatically executed. You have to link the ffprobe to /usr/local/bin/. You can find the FFmpeg install directory with brew info ffmpeg. Usually you would link the file with ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/ffmpeg/<version>/bin/ffprobe /usr/local/bin/ffprobe.

Running Opencast

You can start Opencast using the start-opencast script:

cd /your/path/to/opencast/
cd build/opencast-dist-allinone-[…]
./bin/start-opencast

As soon as Opencast is completely started, browse to localhost:8080 to get to the administration interface.