How to Install dapptools on an M1 Mac

Saturday, August 7, 2021 · 3 min read

I ran in to some issues trying to install dapptools on my M1 MacBook Air. The project Readme.md helpfully explains that you have to run dapptools and the installer under Rosetta 2. But it took me a few tries to get it right and there wasn’t a clear explanation of the complete steps, so recording those here.

dapptools is a set of UNIX-style command line tools to interact with Ethereum contracts.

Particularly, I wanted to use the seth command line tool to interact with some contracts. I haven’t run in to many issues installing tooling on my M1 MacBook Air, but following the basic installation in the dapptools Readme threw a bunch of errors. After looking back through again, I noticed the note about GHC compilation in Haskell on ARM architecture.

Now knowing that you have to install and run the program under a Rosetta 2 emualted x86 program was all well and good, but I didn’t have any idea what that meant. Some searching later, I found a helpful tutorial on how to set up your Terminal profile to run Rosetta 2 instead of the default. Once the profile was set up, you have to both install Nix and run the dapptools installation script from the Rosetta 2 terminal. ⊕ This note thanks to a bit of a frustration from successfully installing Nix under the ARM environment, then running in to errors when trying to install dapptools in the Rosetta 2 environment.

Once the environment issues were sorted out the installation ran without a problem.

So here are the full setps to install dapptools on an M1 Mac.

1. Open Terminal, go to Prefrences and create a duplicate profile from your current set up.
2. Rename the new profile and change the title in the Window tab of prefrences so that you know it is a Rosetta 2 terminal
3. Go to the Shell tab in prefrences and add the startup command (uncheck the “Run inside Shell” option)

   env /usr/bin/arch -x86_64 /bin/zsh --login
   

4. Open a new terminal with the Rosetta 2 profile you just created.
5. Install Nix per the dapptools readme instructions:

   # user must be in sudoers
   curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh
   
   # Run this or login again to use Nix
   . "$HOME/.nix-profile/etc/profile.d/nix.sh"
   

6. Install dapptools:

   curl https://dapp.tools/install | sh
   

That should do it. You will need to use the Rosetta 2 profile to run dapptools programs. You can run seth --help to check that it is working. Unless you have a local node running to use seth you still have to do some configuration of the .sethrc file to run queries. For me that meant setting up the RPC configuration to use a free Infura account.

# Add this line to your .sethrc with your API key
export ETH_RPC_URL=https://infura.io/v3/<API-KEY>