CiderPress II Download and Installation Guide
March 26, 2026 ยท View on GitHub
The command-line and GUI applications are written in C#, targeted to .NET 8. The .NET runtime is available for download from Microsoft for a variety of platforms, including Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It's even available for the Raspberry PI. The documentation says that .NET 8 is only supported for Windows 10+, MacOS 13+, and recent versions of Linux, but in practice the command-line tool has been used successfully on Windows 7 and MacOS 11 (these are officially "out of support").
While the command-line tool is usable on multiple platforms, the GUI is currently only available for Windows (native or emulated).
There are two types of downloads here: self-contained and framework-dependent. The former includes all necessary parts of the .NET runtime in the package, so there's no need to have .NET installed on your system. If you happen to have .NET 8 or later already installed, the framework-dependent package is significantly smaller. You can also download a pre-packaged Wine binary that allows you to run the GUI application on recent versions of Mac OS, but this may have stability issues and is considered experimental.
You can pick a file to download from the Releases page, or use one of the links below to download the most recent stable release.
Self-Contained (30-65 MB)
Framework-Dependent (~1 MB)
Wine Emulation (EXPERIMENTAL) (450+ MB)
| System | Link |
|---|---|
| Mac OS | https://github.com/fadden/CiderPress2/releases/download/v1.2.0/cp2wine_1.2.0_mac.zip |
Once downloaded, unzip the file somewhere convenient (Safari on the Mac will do the unzip for you). There is no installer; the commands are executed directly from where they are unzipped. On some systems an additional step may be necessary. (For the pre-packaged Wine binary, see the README file included in the ZIP for additional instructions.)
You will need a command-line shell to run "cp2":
- Windows: hit Windows+R to open the "run" window. Enter "cmd" for a classic DOS shell or "powershell" for something fancier, and hit return.
- Linux: use "xterm", "gnome-terminal", or whatever you like.
- Mac OS: from the Finder, in the Go menu, select Utilities. Double-click Terminal to launch it.
In the shell, change to the directory where the files were unzipped. Then:
- Windows: run
./cp2 versionto confirm it works. You will probably need to click through some security warnings. If you're interested in the GUI version, double-clickCiderPress2.exe. - Linux: the command should have been made executable when unzipped; if not, use
chmod +x cp2to fix it. Run./cp2 versionto confirm it works. - Mac OS: the command should have been made executable when unzipped; if not, use
chmod +x cp2to make it executable. The system adds a "quarantine" flag to anything downloaded from the Internet, so you need to do an extra step before you can execute the program. In the directory where the files were unpacked, runxattr -d com.apple.quarantine *. Run./cp2 versionto confirm this was successful. The x64 code requires Rosetta 2 to run on Apple Silicon macs; if you've never run an Intel-based program on your Mac, it won't be present, and you will see "bad CPU type in executable" messages. Apple support has instructions for getting Rosetta 2 installed.
The commands are:
cp2: command-line interfaceCiderPress2: desktop graphical interface (Windows builds only)
The download includes the manual for the cp2 command-line utility, Manual-cp2.md, formatted for
80 columns for ease of viewing in a terminal window. The file is in "Markdown" format, which is
perfectly readable as a plain text file. The manual for the GUI, and tutorials for both forms of
the application, can be found on the web site.
Installing .NET
Should you wish to use the framework-dependent packages, you'll need to install the .NET runtime. Get it here: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/en-us/download . Find the "all .NET 8.0 downloads" link (or whatever version is current) and click on it. In the ".NET Runtime" section (or, for Windows, ".NET Desktop Runtime" section), download the appropriate item from the Installers column. You can also download a more complete package, such as the SDK or the ASP.NET Core Runtime, but they're larger and have things you won't need if you just want to run CiderPress II. The downloads in the Binaries column will give you a "dotnet" executable and libraries without an installer, which means you'll have the runtime but may not have it automatically configured in your shell path.
Tested Systems
The CiderPress II command-line utility was developed on x64 CPUs with:
- Windows 10 (build 19044)
- macOS 11.6.3 "Big Sur" (x86) and 15.2 "Sequoia" (Apple silicon)
- Linux Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS
Compatibility is determined mostly by the .NET runtime, so more recent versions of the operating systems are expected to work. Older versions of the operating systems may or may not work. For example, the CLI application has been successfully run on Windows 7 32-bit (x86), but this will not be tested regularly.
The code is targeted to .NET 8.
Support for Other Systems
The contents of the framework-dependent download packages for different systems are almost entirely identical. The application itself is compiled to platform-agnostic bytecode. Each platform has a system-specific "cp2" executable that gets the runtime up and pointed in the right direction. The only significant difference is between 32-bit code and 64-bit code; you cannot run a 64-bit package on a 32-bit runtime.
If you want to run the command-line app on a platform that doesn't have a system-specific
binary on the Releases page, you need to install the .NET runtime for your system, and then
download one of the framework-dependent packages (e.g. win-x86_fd or win-x64_fd depending
on whether your target is 32-bit or 64-bit, respectively). You can then run the program with
dotnet cp2.dll <args>. For convenience, you can wrap that up in a shell script, like this:
#!/bin/sh
exec PATH/TO/dotnet PATH/TO/cp2.dll $@
If you would prefer to build the sources from scratch, the steps for doing so are:
- Install the .NET 8 SDK for your system. If you're using a package manager, look for a package with "dotnet-sdk" in the name.
- Clone the source tree:
git clone https://github.com/fadden/CiderPress2. - From the
CiderPress2directory, run themkcp2.shshell script.
Using the GUI on Linux and macOS
It's possible to run the GUI application under macOS and Linux using the Wine compatibility layer. Instructions for setting this up can be found here.
The emulation is very good, but not perfect. You may experience problems that don't occur when run natively on Windows.