Since macOS 10.8, Apple requires applications to be signed before they can be run. However, code signing is a paid process (costing a $99/year subscription, and more if you also want to publish to the Mac App Store).
Independent developers may not have the time or budget required to sign their applications or upload them to the Mac App Store. Due to this, many open source applications can’t be run out of the box on macOS.
Recent macOS versions have made it increasingly difficult to disable Gatekeeper. Thankfully, there are still several ways to disable or bypass it as of March 2021.
sudo spctl --master-disable
.
Enter your administrator password when requested.Note: This method may not work for all applications. If the application still doesn’t run after following the steps below, try following the steps described in Using Terminal instead.
You only have to do this for the first application start. You can start the application as usual afterwards.
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /path/to/Application.app
.
The path is case-sensitive and must point to the application bundle.
(You can use Tab to complete file paths.)You only have to do this before starting the application for the first time. You can start the application as usual afterwards.
You can also download the application using a tool that doesn’t set the
quarantine attribute. curl
or wget
should work for this. Open a terminal
then run:
# Quoting the URL is recommended to avoid issues with special characters.
curl -LO "file URL"
# Or, if you have installed wget:
wget "file URL"
This is how Steam and update frameworks like Sparkle are able to download and run applications without requiring them to be signed.
With today’s security threats, antivirus software is becoming less relevant over the years. Many antiviruses are now fooled by malware executables, and other forms of malware aren’t detected by most antiviruses. While perfect security doesn’t exist, it still is a good idea to avoid exposing yourself to modern threats such as ransomware.
To make your computing more secure, consider the following options:
hosts
file.
This has the upside of working on all software on your computer,
not just Web browsers.If the application was packaged in a ZIP archive, this could be due to the
executable (+x
) attribute being missing on the binary contained in the .app
bundle. To solve this:
chmod +x /path/to/Application.app/Contents/MacOS/*
.
The path is case-sensitive and must point to the application bundle.
(You can use Tab to complete file paths.)You only have to do this before starting the application for the first time. You can start the application as usual afterwards.
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