rclone: OSX Catalina: “rclone” cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified

What is the problem you are having with rclone?

Max OSX Catalina refuses to run rclone.

rclone

(Are the released binaries notarized?)

What is your rclone version (output from rclone version)

Tried v1.49.5, v1.50.0 and the latest beta. (64 bit)

Which OS you are using and how many bits (eg Windows 7, 64 bit)

OSX Catalina, 64 bit

Which cloud storage system are you using? (eg Google Drive)

n/a

The command you were trying to run (eg rclone copy /tmp remote:tmp)

rclone

A log from the command with the -vv flag (eg output from rclone -vv copy /tmp remote:tmp)

Not possible.

About this issue

  • Original URL
  • State: closed
  • Created 5 years ago
  • Comments: 16 (13 by maintainers)

Commits related to this issue

Most upvoted comments

Thank you @marco-m for your docs update.

I think the summary on the pull request is worth repeating here for interested parties

  1. install.sh works out of the box.
  2. brew install rclone works out of the box.
  3. if downloading with a web browser, the xattr workaround works.

I’m happy with the workarounds so I don’t think I will jump through the hoops of fire to become a macOS registered developer just yet 😃

I’d expect that most CLI-users on macOS are using a package manager like Homebrew already, with others presumably becoming aware of the xattr -d com.apple.quarantine-workaround rather quickly. Recommending brew install rclone should be okay as a solution.

That said, if @ncw still wants to submit rclone for notarization I wouldn’t mind donating the $99 for this project to obtain a Developer ID. I appreciate that this project is well-managed with frequent commits, and it doesn’t sit right with me that you should pay for a platform that you’re not even using yourself.

While I doubt that Apple rolled this program out with the intent of squeezing money out of developers (it’s not as if the $99 fee has any significant impact on their revenue), they’ve certainly rushed the implementation of it and likely underestimate the number of cross-platform developers without Macs which it affects.

I saw this potential work-around (which I read about in a terraform issue)

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /path/to/rclone/binary

Does that work?

Apparently the com.apple.quarantine is set by the browser? Which makes me wonder if downloading the binary with curl/wget would have the same problem.

The workaround is to attempt to run rclone as per above, and then go to System Preferences -> Security & Privacy and press “Allow Anyway”:

Banners_and_Alerts_and_Security___Privacy_and_Calc_etc__34_tabs__macOS_Catalina_error__“terraform”_cannot_be_opened_because_the_developer_cannot_be_verified__·_Issue__23033_·_hashicorp_terraform

Next time you run rclone, you’ll get:

rclone

Pressing “Open” will store the exception for you locally so that rclone once again can be used on your system.

The real fix is to sign and notarize the OSX binary releases.