Help with installing on Mac

[oakif]

Hello! I apologize for the basic question, but I'm trying to figure out how to install this plugin on Catalina. I'm stuck at the step where I need to specify the VMD plugin directory—I never installed a VMD plugin before. I'm also not sure where the plugin headers and system-specific molfile libraries reside. These need to be defined when using cmake.

[mphoward]

Plugins get installed into the same location as VMD. You should know where you installed VMD on your version of macOS (since you are also using Catalina, I guess it is a port)... it is probably somewhere in your Applications.

From the README:

VMD_PLUGIN_INCLUDE_PATH and VMD_PLUGIN_MOLFILE_PATH. These directories are the location of your plugin headers (e.g., molfile_plugin.h) and system-specific molfile libraries, respectively.

So, within your VMD installation, you need to do a find for molfile_plugin.h, which gives the VMD_PLUGIN_INCLUDE_PATH and for any built-in plugin like xyzplugin.so, which gives the VMD_PLUGIN_MOLFILE_PATH.

I would recommend trying to point to the VMD installation with VMDDIR first, though, as cmake can do this search automatically with the right hints. VMDDIR points to the base vmd directory that is common to Linux and macOS. The default guess for VMDDIR is /Applications/*/Contents/vmd on macOS, but you should set it to the appropriate value for your system, either as an env var or with -DVMDDIR.

[oakif]

Thanks a lot! That worked. It turns out I didn't realize that the Applications folder was the "installation" directory. If anyone else comes into this issue, just type in VMDDIR=/Applications after dragging the .app to your default Applications directory. cmake takes care of the rest; the plugins directory is a inside a subfolder of the .app in your Applications folder.