Installing the Plom Client

If you just need to use Plom to grade some papers then you only need the Plom Client. This can be obtained in several ways:

GNU/Linux users can install from Flathub.
Compiled binaries are available from our releases page.
Install from source or using pip.

For macOS

Download the appropriate “Compiled client” for your version of macOS from our releases page.

The macOS client ships as a .zip file. Open it and drag the .app bundle out onto your desktop or into your Applications folder. You can then delete the .zip file if you wish.

Note

Unfortunately the .app is not “signed” which means you will likely get a security warning preventing you from opening it. You may need to change something in “Privacy & Security” in “System Preferences”, see Issue #1676 for details.

For Windows

Download the “Compiled client for Windows” from our releases page.

Locate the .exe file on your computer and double-click on it.

(You may get warnings about unsigned files, but it should be possible to continue. You can check the md5sums in our releases page if you want to verify your download.)

For GNU/Linux

Users of various distributions can install from Flathub.

Another option is to download the “AppImage” from our releases page.

You may need to change the permissions on the binary to make it executable. Open a terminal and go to the directory where you saved the binary:

chmod +x PlomClient-x.y.z-x86_64.AppImage
./PlomClient-x.y.z-x86_64.AppImage

For ChromeOS (Chromebook)

In theory, installing via Flathub should work, but in practice it does not (Issue #3131).

It is still possible to install Plom Client by first enabling the Linux container on your Chromebook. Then we install some of the dependencies manually in the terminal:

apt install python3-pyqt6 python3-pyqt6.qtsvg pyqt6-dev-tools \
    python3-platformdirs python3-packaging python3-requests-toolbelt \
    python3-tomlkit python3-tqdm python3-arrow

Note

It is important to install PyQt6 using apt, rather than with pip: the latter will hit (as of Nov 2024) the same Issue #3131 mentioned above.

Next we install some dependencies that are not available in Debian 12.8, again using the terminal: pip --break-system-packages install pyspellchecker (yes that looks scary: feel free to learn about venv instead if you wish).

Finally you can type pip install --no-deps --break-system-packages plom. The reason for --no-deps is because we want to avoid installing all the dependencies for the Plom Server. In the future, we intend to decouple the client and server packages.

To launch Plom Client, open the terminal and type:

./local/bin/plom-client

or:

python3 -m plom.client