Installation

shed-desktop is an Apple Silicon (arm64) macOS app. It requires macOS 14 or newer.

Download the DMG

Grab the latest ShedDesktop-<version>.dmg from the releases page, open it, and drag ShedDesktop.app to Applications.

Builds are ad-hoc signed but not yet notarized, so Gatekeeper blocks the first launch. Once, after copying it in:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/ShedDesktop.app

(Or double-click it, dismiss the warning, then System Settings → Privacy & Security → "Open Anyway". The DMG's FIRST-LAUNCH.txt explains this too.) After that the app auto-updates via Sparkle — menu → Check for Updates… — verified by an EdDSA signature, no notarization required. See RELEASING.md.

Build from source

Prerequisites: Xcode 16+ (Swift 6 toolchain).

git clone https://github.com/charliek/shed-desktop
cd shed-desktop
make bundle          # builds build/ShedDesktop.app (ad-hoc signed)
open build/ShedDesktop.app

The bundle embeds the shedctl CLI at build/ShedDesktop.app/Contents/Resources/bin/shedctl. make dmg packages a release bundle into build/ShedDesktop-<version>.dmg.

Signed builds

Release builds are ad-hoc signed until a Developer ID certificate is configured. To produce a notarizable build locally, set the signing identity:

SHED_DESKTOP_DEVELOPER_ID_IDENTITY="Developer ID Application: …" ./scripts/bundle.sh release

What it needs at runtime

• ~/.shed/config.yaml — the shed-server host list (created by the shed CLI). The app reads this read-only and watches it for changes.
• A reachable shed-server on at least one configured host. Unreachable hosts are shown as a degraded state, never a hard failure.