Running Pentaho Data Integration in Mac OS Catalina version 10.15 and above

Haszeli Ahmad
4 min readFeb 26, 2020

If you haven’t download the application, you may access here https://community.hitachivantara.com/s/article/downloads

Download the community version (or enterprise version)

Running Pentaho Data Integration @ Spoon in Windows or Linux should be straight-forward. Either click on spoon.bat or spoon.sh or the Data Integration app icon.

Data Integration

However, for Mac OS, especially with the latest version Catalina which only allowed certified and trusted 64-bit application to run, running Data Integration will be troublesome despite the security for the app was disabled and allowed for the application to run. Some of the guidance on enable security and allow the untrusted app to run are as follow:

https://edpflager.com/?p=3571

https://andres.jaimes.net/1388/running-pentaho-spoon-on-mac-osx/

I have tried both and after enabling the apps, click on the Data Integration icon still does not work and the application still did not run.

Lastly, I had to try to run it through the terminal. For OSX Catalina and above, instead of normal bash, Apple brings in zsh and the behavior is totally different. Plus, if you are a developer and install many Java JDK, running the Pentaho Data Integration will not be as running the normal command. Here is the step to run on the terminal and it works for all OSX.

  1. Open up your terminal

2. Navigate to your install path (where you install or unzip the data integration file)

3. Run ./spoon.sh (for bash or old scripting, running spoon.sh shall work without ‘./’)

4. If you run into an error such as JDK or java runtime error like below, do not panic. This maybe your current java JDK is set to be higher than supported by the application.

5. First, check your JDK version. Open a new terminal as the command need to be executed from the base (unless you set the JDK in your profile which may cause problem to run multiple JDK later). Run command java -version. You shall have similar to below. In my laptop, the current JDK version is set to JDK version 10.

6. Make sure you have multiple java JDK installed if you need to use the existing JDK version for your ‘other’ development. Refer https://www.devdungeon.com/content/install-multiple-jdk-windows-java-development to install multiple JDK. Refer here https://www.jenv.be/ to install jenv command tool.

7. For my laptop, I have few versions of JDK and using jenv, I can set the selected JDK for global or local (only applied to the folder where we run jenv local command). Run jenv version to check on current JDK and jenv versions to list all JDK install.
As of this manual written, Pentaho Data Integration @ Spoon supports up to JDK 1.8.

8. Use jenv to change the jdk to 1.8. Run command jenv local [JDK number]. In this example, I execute jenv local 1.8.0.232.

Finally, run again ./spoon.sh. The application shall run.

Pentaho Data Integration boot up
Main Screen

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Haszeli Ahmad

Technologist, Analyst, Engineer and Architect by profession but a photographer by hobby