Working project setup on Windows 11 2025?

[MJimmyChen-reform]

Hey,

I've been trying to get this project set up and working with Windows 11 and it looks like there are way too many adaptations to be done to get it working.

• Pygraphviz problems -> resolved through an Anaconda install
• Since the jar files are older versions you mostly have to google the jar file together with the version and get most of them through mvnrepository
• Had to do some adaptations (Through ChatGPT/LLM) in the run_AMLSim.sh as classpath separators were different for Windows vs Unix
• python3 scripts/visualize/plot_distributions.py conf.json AND python3 scripts/validation/validate_alerts.py conf.json
• For these two optional steps I had to manually remove the empty lines in the tmp/sample/ CSV files and some more fixes for index out of bounds etc

I might have forgotten some, but can somebody tell me that they were able to do a clean set up from scratch without having to all these 'manual' steps that are not documented? Especially the ones that need you to change code or clean the CSVs...

[touchyongan]

✅ How I Successfully Ran AMLSim on macOS (Python 3.8, Java)

After spending several hours troubleshooting, I wanted to share a complete setup guide for getting the AMLSim simulator running on macOS. This should help anyone else who encounters similar issues.

✅ First, use Python to generate data
✅ Then, run the Java simulator with those files

---

1. Set Up Python Environment

⬇️ Use Python 3.8 (important)

python3.8 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate

📦 Install Graphviz (required for pygraphviz)

If pygraphviz can't find Graphviz headers, you'll get errors like
fatal error: 'graphviz/cgraph.h' file not found.

brew install graphviz

Check install location:

brew --prefix graphviz
# Should return something like: /opt/homebrew/opt/graphviz

🔧 Install pygraphviz with header paths

export CFLAGS="-I/opt/homebrew/opt/graphviz/include"
export LDFLAGS="-L/opt/homebrew/opt/graphviz/lib"
pip install wheel
pip install --no-cache-dir --no-build-isolation pygraphviz

Adjust the paths above if your brew --prefix graphviz returns a different location.

📦 Install remaining Python dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Set Up Java + MASON

Make sure Java and Maven are installed. Then download MASON 20.

⬇️ Download MASON 20

Get it from:
https://cs.gmu.edu/~eclab/projects/mason/

Place mason.20.jar into the jars/ folder of this project.

📦 Install the JAR into Maven

mvn install:install-file \
  -Dfile=jars/mason.20.jar \
  -DgroupId=mason \
  -DartifactId=mason \
  -Dversion=20 \
  -Dpackaging=jar \
  -DgeneratePom=true

3. Generate Data Using Python

This creates the transaction graph required by the Java simulator:

python scripts/transaction_graph_generator.py conf.json

Check that it creates the tmp/ directory and associated CSV files.

4. Run the Java Simulator

🔨 Build AMLSim JAR (run once)

sh scripts/build_AMLSim.sh

This compiles the project and builds the JAR under target/.

▶️ Run the simulation

sh scripts/run_AMLSim.sh conf.json

Hope this helps anyone else who runs into the same issues I did.