VMware Fusion is free and works fine.

Install Armory on another PC (or a virtual machine) and import your paper backup over there. That's the only real option for now. I'm not going to touch the build system and get a modern macOS build ready until 0.97 stabilizes.

I'm not aware of any workarounds. I also can't really do any work on finishing the port until the build system settles. So, short of using a VM, macOS users are SOL at the moment.

Hello. FYI, if you're not on macOS 11 yet, and Armory support is important to you, please don't upgrade. Apple has finally prevented Qt 4 from loading. There are two options at the moment for getting around this restriction.

- Don't upgrade. macOS 10.15 does work, at least in some cases.
- Install Parallels or VMware Fusion, install an appropriate OS (Windows or Ubuntu, or a pre-11 macOS ISO if you know what you're doing), install Armory and Bitcoin Core on it, and run Armory from there. If you don't want to download the blockchain again, it is possible to set up shared folders such that Core and Armory can use the data you've already downloaded. You can also copy the data into the VM, although that's an awful lot of redundant storage. (WARNING: Trying to go between Windows and macOS data may be problematic. I can't confirm it.)

Again, when I have time, I'll look into getting a better build system set up such that everything will be fine as of 0.97. The current setup is too much of a pain in the butt to maintain. I refuse to support it any further. Future builds will require a few more Homebrew installs but that's trivial. Also, it'll be online-only. If you somehow have an offline-only setup, please look into migrating elsewhere. Raspberry Pis cost virtually nothing and will receive far more support than an offline Mac setup.

Thanks.

Please read the Mac directions. That should be enough.

Hi. I've been maintaining the Mac build for awhile. To make a very long story short, my maintenance of the Mac build is on the backburner these days. There are two primary reasons.

- I've got a lot going on in my life right now. I don't have much time to dedicate to the project, and what time I do have, I've found myself gravitating towards other projects and hobbies.
- Frankly, I think Armory's build system for the Mac is terrible, and always has been. It was donated by somebody back around 2012/2013. Technically, it works, but it's a real pain in the butt to maintain. That and, long ago, I stopped seeing the point in making things so convoluted. In theory, it allows people to create offline builds. I'm not aware of a single person using Macs for offline Armory, though. (If they are, I highly recommend they pick up a barebones PC with Linux, or even Raspberry Pi 4. Support will be much better and easier.) That and I just don't see the point in downloading all these packages and compiling them locally. It may have been at least somewhat necessary back then. It isn't now, and it just makes compilation much more brittle.

For awhile, I've been toying with the idea of overhauling the Mac build system such that it leans on brew, or possibly brew-pkg if enough people are dead set on using Armory offline on a Mac. Either way, Bitcoin Core uses brew. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me, and it'll make Mac compilation far simpler. Just install a few dependencies and compile Armory like you would under Linux, and you're good. None of this brittle Python script garbage that's prone to breaking every few months.

Of course, I have to pencil in time to write out everything. Depending on how much cruft is there, I might be able to bang out something over a weekend, or even a day. Now that the dev build has finally gotten away from Qt 4 and Python 2, this is far easier.

tl;dr - If you're in a hurry, do it yourself, but I have a path in my head if I can ever carve out enough time to get it done. Either way, if this gets done, it'll be done no earlier than 0.97. Backporting to 0.96 would be far too painful due in large part to the Py2/Qt4 requirement.

While I think you can compile your way around OpenSSL on Qt if you don't mind a lot of pain, I don't think you can on Python. IIRC, even on the latest Python (3.8), you must have OpenSSL for things like Python's PRNGs, even if you roll your own version of Python. There's been vague talk of making this more modular one day so that people can drop in other libraries. I'll expect that one when Hell freezes over.

I'm not sure if it's possible to access the coins anymore, at least via Armory. Bcash has had several hard forks, and has one scheduled for later this month, actually. You may have to export your keys and try another tool.

EDIT: Okay. It turns out that the following was a false alarm. I don't know what happened behind-the-scenes but I just migrated to a new Mac that came preinstalled with macOS 10.15.1. I fired up Armory, expecting it to complain. It didn't. So, all should be well. However, when you run, you have to stay on the OpenSSL 1.0.x line, due to Python nonsense that doesn't apply to Armory. If you bump into an issue where brew installs OpenSSL 1.1, run the following command from the terminal, as seen here. This should do the trick.


Thanks. I'll leave the directions below in case the migration directions are useful to anyone.

--------------------
Hi. Just wanted to get a message out to everyone. If you're running macOS and Armory is important to you, please don't upgrade to 10.15 just yet. Long story short, due to a library dependency, Armory won't run. I don't think there's a way around this without a library upgrade. Said upgrade will be part of 0.97. As always, this is a work-in-progress. (I had some great momentum a couple of months ago but now life is eating up a lot of my free time.)

If you have already upgraded to 10.15, you have some options.

Option 1: Downgrade back to 10.14. I haven't tried this method. This is very much at your own risk.

Option 2a: Use a virtual machine. This is more involved and requires some technical skills. It's also guaranteed to work (with some minor caveats). The steps are as follows.

- First off, back up both your Armory data and Bitcoin Core data. If you have a paper or digital backup, great! If not, don't fret. You can copy your Armory data folder, although this is very much at your own risk. (If you don't know your way around PCs, just stick to paper or digital backups and wait for the upgrade.)
- You'll need to run either Windows or Linux, or macOS 10.14. If you have a separate PC, you're good to go. If you only have a Mac on 10.15, and you have enough resources (4-core CPU and 8GB RAM minimum, along with at least 40GB of storage), you can run what's called a virtual machine. This is basically a way to run an operating system on top of another operating system. VirtualBox is free but I find it clunky. VMWare Fusion costs US$50 but is easier to use, and arguably a bit more stable (with one caveat listed below).
- For the VM, install your desired OS. I recommend the latest Windows 10, or Ubuntu 18.04 (latest long-term stable release), or macOS 10.14 (will need a free Mac developer account to download the latest image, and then do some black magic to create an ISO that your VM software can handle, so I don't recommend this except to fellow tech nerds). I recommend Ubuntu if at all possible but Windows should work fine, and it's still free.
- Run the VM OS, install the latest security patches, and install Armory and Bitcoin Core on the VM.
- If at all possible, copy over your Bitcoin Core and Armory data, or at least put it somewhere that the VM OS can access it (512GB or larger thumb drive is best). This is the quickest option. Otherwise, you'll have to download the entire blockchain again, restore your wallet from your backup, and wait for Armory to resync.
- Run both Bitcoin Core and Armory from the command line, with the options to read the respective data from appropriate directories. Look here for Armory pathing and here for Bitcoin Core.
- Use Armory as normal.
- Once Armory supports 10.15, you'll either need to stick to using the updated data (e.g., on your thumb drive) or copy the updated data back to your normal Mac directory. That's your call. Either way, be consistent, use only the updated data, and don't try to go back to 0.96.x (unless you use a VM or separate computer).

Please note that VMs can be a little weird at times. They're inherently slower than the OS that they're running on. In addition, strange bugs can affect your experience. While it was a bit of a worst case scenario, a bug in macOS 10.14.6 made my VMs unusable for weeks (which, in turn, helped kill my Armory upgrade momentum). Please be careful if you go down this path.

Option 2b: Use a separate PC. The steps are basically the same as 2a. You'll just be on a physically separate PC. If it already has Windows or Linux on it, there's no need to reinstall, although you should make sure to run with the latest security patches installed.

I believe that covers all the bases. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Thanks for your patience!

1)What is the exact problem that you're having?

2)I need to make a separate post, but just so that everybody knows, Armory won't run on 10.15 due to some changes Apple made. Please don't upgrade to it just yet.

Please update to the latest Bitcoin Core and to the latest Armory and make sure your blockchain is fully up to date before running Armory again.

Something's going wrong. You need to make sure brew is installed. That's the first step (along with a few steps to ensure that it's fully up to date and pointing at a couple of important things). What happens when you try to run the install command on the brew page I just linked?

Yes, the 0.96.x line uses fcgi, which is ancient and doesn't like to close properly on Macs. The 0.97 line will use libwebsockets, which is modern and behaves nicely.

Yes, I was about to say that you don't want quotes, and you want the directory that includes the directory with the blocks, not the actual blocks directory. Glad you figured it out.

Is Bitcoin Core running? You need to run that too.

As an update on that end, there have been three main holdups.

- The cppyy project is the main linchpin here. It's pretty slick, and Wim's a very smart guy. Alas, like any project, it has holes. We find 'em, we report 'em, we usually get a fix within a day or two. I want to say that this portion is close to being done.
- There's something in WebSocket that isn't working right with the GUI. I was trying to track it down when...
- ...due to Apple's stupidity, my VMs became unusable for a few weeks. They're kinda usable now but, until Apple issues a proper fix (and who knows if they will or if they'll try to force an upgrade to macOS 10.15), I may have to force a downgrade of my Mac. Thanks for nothing, Tim.

The switch from Py2 to Py3 remains to be done. We have somebody who has offered to help. I don't know if he's still interested, although I assume he is (contingent on his schedule). I'm pretty busy myself but will do what I can to help. This really needs to get done ASAP for a variety of reasons.

Oh, and also, can you run Armory from the command line and tell me what happens? You'll need to go to the command line, go into the Armory directory, and manually start Armory. Here's an example. It assumes Armory is in /Applications, and that /Applications/Armory.app/Contents/MacOS is your terminal's working directory. If your data is in the default location (i.e., you haven't moved anything around), ignore the datadir and satoshi-datadir portions.


There are ways to automate this but focus on getting this to run manually for now. ExtDriveName is actually whatever your drive is called, and ArmoryDataLocation and BitcoinCoreDataLocation are the directories where the respective data resides.

Hey. My apologies. Been busy. Can you post your logs?

Hi. Please update to Core 0.18. In addition, please let me know which Mac model you're using (e.g., 2018 Macbook Pro). I'll give instructions from there.

Thanks.