How to install DrRacket on Mac OS and Homebrew

2020-03-01

Homebrew is excellent and you can install a minimal racket by running

brew istall racket

Once this finishes, you'll see instructions on how to install DrRacket with
raco. Follow the advice:

raco pkg install --auto drracket

This takes a while. You might struggle to actually find the DrRacket.app or launch DrRacket.

If you've never used racket before, you probably don't know raco either and you won't know where it has installed all the things.

Run the following to find out where raco has placed the .app:

racket -e '(require setup/dirs) (displayln (path->string (find-gui-bin-dir))) (for-each displayln (directory-list (find-gui-bin-dir)))'

This lists /usr/local/Cellar/minimal-racket/7.5/bin as the directory where
DrRacket.app sits on my machine. Running
/usr/local/Cellar/minimal-racket/7.5/bin/DrRacket.app/Contents/MacOS/DrRacket
from the command line will launch DrRacket.

I symlinked it so it was a little easier:

ln -s /usr/local/Cellar/minimal-racket/7.5/bin/DrRacket.app/Contents/MacOS/DrRacket /usr/local/bin/drracket