Bitmessage is awesome. However, the installation process isn't particularly intuitive.
I just got it working on OSX, and thought I'd share my findings.
First, make sure you have
git and
Homebrew installed. Then, you need to make sure homebrew is working. Open Terminal, and run
and fix anything critical that it returns.
Now, install the dependencies. You will need to update Python to 2.7.3. You probably have 2.7.2 at the moment. Run
to update to the correct version. In order for Bitmessage to run, you also need OpenSSL and PyQt. Install these with
brew install pyqt openssl
Now, you're ready to actually download the Bitmessage source code. First,
cd to your desktop or wherever you want to install it. Then, run
git clone git://github.com/Bitmessage/PyBitmessage.git
to download it from GitHub. Now, cd into PyBitmessage src folder, and enter
The Bitmessage UI should open. At this point you can minimize the terminal window, which should be spewing a ton of info.
It works! However, it's inconvenient to run these two commands every time we want to run bitmessage. It's extremely easy to create a script to run it for us.
To do this, open textedit and enter
python ~/Desktop/PyBitmessage/src/bitmessagemain.py
You may need to adjust the path to wherever you installed it.
Now, save it as Bitmessage.command. To make it executable enter
but
do not press enter. Hit space and drag the Bitmessage.command file into the Terminal window. Now hit enter, and the file will be executable.
You can easily open Bitmessage by double clicking this file.
If you get it working, feel free to send me a message to my address! Hope this helped.