Let’s be honest. The M1 Mac was designed to make the already hard life of graduate students who code much harder. I was trying to install NUPACK and it failed me in more ways than my eight standard economics quiz. I am not really a rule follower so I also don’t follow the official documentation word-by-word which could also be a ‘small’ and ‘insignificant’ reason for my troubles. Either way, closely following the official documentation could get you where you want to.
I am gonna repeaat the instructions here so that you’d be assured that atleast someone got it working on an M1. The documentation linked above first asks you to download the version of NUPACK from the official page that is marked as “M1”. Hand to God, I didn’t find a single distribution that was labeled “M1”. So, I did eenie-meenie-monie with the distributions and picked…just kidding. Like any respectable computer scientist would, I picked the latest version.
The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers Shakespeare (2001). No don’t. The first thing we do is download Python 3.8 or higher. Keep in mind two things. (1) The version must be 3.8+. (2) Make sure the python used is native. That means no virtual environment business. Use the python that’s installed in your PC. Here’s my executable:
$ which python3
/opt/homebrew/bin/python3
$ python3 --version
Python 3.10.8
I then proceeded to read Cloud Atlas. Oops, wrong timeline. I then proceeded to unzip the downloaded NUPACK folder.
$ unzip nupack-VERSION.zip
Now simply install the nupack package from the downloaded file as follows:
$ python3 -m pip install -U nupack -f nupack-VERSION/package
And that’s it. Try to execute import nupack and you should succeed. If
you don’t succeed, well, it’s your own fault for buying your stupid M1.