Installing CKAN on macOS

Why is this page popping up?

If this page popped up after launching CKAN, you are missing Mono! Follow the link in step 1 below to install it.

Installing manually

1. Download and install Mono

2. Download CKAN.dmg from https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN/releases/latest

3. Open it

4. Drag CKAN.app to your desktop (or any other folder you prefer)

5. Double click it

6. If a permission request similar to "bash" wants access to control "Terminal" pops up, press "OK"

If you are on macOS Catalina, you'll notice that CKAN's Console UI opens in a terminal, instead of the GUI. This is because macOS dropped support for 32-bit applications with version 10.15, and Mono's WinForms implementation is 32-bit only. For more information, check this PR and this issue.

Installing via Homebrew

UPDATE of January 2024: On MacOS Sonoma, CKAN will appear to work with the below commands, but will quickly break and begin hanging on every download.

UPDATE of April 2020:

This worked for me on macOS Mojave:

$ brew update
$ brew install mono
$ brew install ckan
$ ckan consoleui

Installed versions are:

ckan 1.27.0
mono 6.8.0.105

NOTE: As of early 2019, Mono does not work when installed via Homebrew, see Homebrew/homebrew-core#35848. Use the above method to install Mono.

UPDATE: The above issue has been closed by the Homebrew team despite the problem still existing and no progress having been made toward a fix. Do not use Homebrew.

Using Console UI

If you are on macOS 10.15 or later, see the user guide for help with using the Terminal-based UI.