How should we support LORIS developer installs on macOS in 2026?

[Montekkundan]

Lets revisit whether LORIS should again support macOS for local development.

While testing local setup on macOS, a few environment-specific issues came up:

• localhost vs 127.0.0.1 behavior during DB/socket resolution
• additional DB privileges needed during setup/debugging
• a missing LORIS.md5 SQL function encountered while loading the dashboard
• differences between the documented macOS setup flow and the current repo/CI flow

Questions for maintainers/contributors:

1. What level of macOS support do we want to offer: unofficial docs, supported dev setup, or parity with Linux?
2. Which of the above should become product issues vs documentation updates?
3. Has anyone else reproduced the localhost / privilege / SQL-function problems on current macOS + Homebrew MySQL/MariaDB?
4. If we support macOS for development, what should the recommended stack be in 2026?

[skarya22]

Hi @Montekkundan,

Thank you for opening up this discussion, I think it's a great thing to review. It's no small feat that you were able to set-up LORIS on your OS without proper documentation to follow.

Personally I'm in favour of an unofficial doc, maybe even just in the form of this discussion post with instructions that explains your personal experience of how to modify the Linux instructions to work better with your instance of MacOS. In the future, when other developers also try to set-up on MacOS, they could comment here on what worked or what they needed to change.

I'd be worried about fully supporting MacOS for development as it is not used quite often for LORIS development, and issues could appear in future versions of dependency updates, or LORIS updates.

I'm curious to see other thoughts on this too! Thanks again for the start to the discussion.