Work Around for addons not working on MacOS | Blender 2.80 RC1

If you've downloaded the latest blender release candidate, you might have found that certain addons (including ours) don't work. What we've tracked this down to, with thanks to Paul Reznick's post in our forum (thanks mate!), is that it appears that any addon that relies on the python library 'types' causes an error as soon as it's loaded.

You can of course confirm this yourself in a number of ways, first is the easy one, you might have already noticed your favourite addon not working, or our addon not working, either one.

The really quick way to verify for sure is to open Blender's python console and simply type

import types

kind of like this...

Great, how to fix this please?

Thanks to Paul's skills and generosity, he has discovered and published a workaround in our forum, which will be summarised here. There are some important caveats with this method, which is a workaround until the cause of the problem is fixed.

Is it safe?

The solution involves turning off Macintosh's SIP (System Integrity Protection) which is all about stopping malware from making unwanted changes to system files. If you feel this might be not in your best interests, then this fix is certainly not for you, you'll need to disable the SIP in order to get addons that use ctypes to work. Common sense applies here, if you don't know the consequences of turning of the SIP, its better to wait for the official fix.

How do I do the workaround?

The workaround requires you to put your mac into recovery mode by restarting it and holding command+R as the computer restarts. Once in recovery mode, you can then select to open a terminal window where you will need to enter the following command;

csrutil disable

As mentioned above, this disables a security feature of the macintosh operating system, you may wish to turn it back on again at some point in the future, especially once the underlying problem has been fixed and there's no need for the workaround anymore.

To re-enable the SIP, you will need to run the following command after entering recovery mode once more (see above);

csrutil enable

Will there be a fix soon?

We've already made this issue known to the blender developers. There is now an official bug report, see https://developer.blender.org/T66986, so we're waiting to hear back when there is a fix coming for this.

Until then, there is the workaround, or not using addons that are affected or ctypes, whichever is most appropriate for your circumstances :)

Any other way to run the Blender 2.80 RC and addons that use ctypes?

Yes, sort of, as David Frank mentions over at https://devtalk.blender.org/t/release-candidate-blender-2-80-cant-import-addons/8352/8 you can technically achieve this by using the latest experimental builds.

While they are not in a .dmg package, you should still be getting the latest and greatest blender 2.80 beta and it doesn't break addons that use ctypes. You can get the experimental builds here -> https://builder.blender.org/download/