macOS Zombie

macOS Zombie turns a macOS 13 Ventura or newer desktop into a private, root-capable AI Systems Administrator host. It creates a dedicated local zombie account, deploys the chat service under /opt/ai-zombie, stores configuration in /etc/macos-zombie, and logs to /Library/Logs/macos-zombie/.

Install on a disposable or intentionally managed Mac:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/japer-technology/macos-zombie/main/scripts/install.sh | sudo bash

Common non-interactive install:

sudo ZOMBIE_NONINTERACTIVE=1 \
  SSH_PUBLIC_KEY="ssh-ed25519 AAAA... you@example" \
  TAILSCALE_AUTHKEY="tskey-auth-..." \
  ./scripts/install.sh install

Subcommands: install, upgrade, verify, doctor, repair, and uninstall. Preview any mutating run without sudo using --dry-run:

./scripts/install.sh install --dry-run

Services are launchd daemons named tech.japer.macos-zombie.chat and tech.japer.macos-zombie.health. Remote access uses macOS Remote Login, built-in Screen Sharing, and optional Tailscale.

Upgrade in place from a newer checkout of this repo:

git pull
sudo ./scripts/install.sh upgrade

upgrade is idempotent. It runs brew update && brew upgrade for the managed packages, redeploys /opt/ai-zombie, refreshes the agent Python venv and global npm tools, rewrites the launchd plists, restarts both daemons, and records the new version in /etc/macos-zombie/VERSION.

Development

Run make lint (ShellCheck + bash -n + Python compile), make test (non-root smoke checks plus the tests/python/ pytest suite), and make package to build a release bundle. Install the shared git hooks with pre-commit install so commits run the same checks as CI. See SUPPORT.md for triage and RELEASE.md for the maintainer release process.

Inspiration

The Ubuntu version is the master concept and feature set: https://github.com/japer-technology/ubuntu-zombie