ThinkWatch Homebrew tap

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The Homebrew cask for ThinkWatch Lite, the desktop app for a local AI API gateway. The cask installs the macOS build, which runs on Apple silicon with macOS 12 or later.

brew install --cask thinkwatchproject/tap/thinkwatch-lite

Installing by the full name taps this repository automatically; a separate brew tap is not required.

The Windows and Linux builds, and the disk image for a manual installation on macOS, are available on the ThinkWatch Lite page and on the releases page.

ThinkWatch Lite.app in /Applications. The gateway, ThinkWatch Core, is part of the app bundle, so no second package or background service has to be installed.

The app is built for Apple silicon only. There is no universal binary, so the cask requires an arm64 Mac and refuses to install on an Intel Mac instead of installing an app that cannot run there.

The app is signed with the project's self-signed certificate, not with an Apple Developer ID. The certificate does not satisfy Gatekeeper. It gives every release the same signer, so that brew upgrade recognizes a new version as coming from the same source as the installed one and does not report a changed signer.

macOS quarantines files downloaded from the internet and does not open an app that is not signed by a registered Apple developer. Since macOS 15, opening the app with a Control-click no longer bypasses this check; the remaining options are System Settings › Privacy & Security › Open Anyway, once per installation, or removing the quarantine attribute. The cask's postflight step removes the attribute:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/ThinkWatch Lite.app"

Apart from copying the app out of its disk image, this is the only action the cask performs. To install without it, download ThinkWatch-Lite-<version>-arm64.dmg from the releases page, compare it with the SHA-256 checksum published beside it, and run the command above.

The checksum in the cask is not copied from that published file. It is computed from the disk image that the update job downloads, and the update fails if the two checksums differ: a checksum published next to the file it describes does not verify that file on its own.

brew update && brew upgrade --cask thinkwatch-lite

An app installed with Homebrew does not update itself. Homebrew records the version it placed in /Applications; if the app replaced its own bundle, that record would point to a version that is no longer on disk, and the next brew upgrade would install the older version over the newer one.

The app checks this tap instead of the release page, so a new version is reported only after the cask here carries it. The app reports it in a notification, in its menu and in Settings; each of these opens a window with the command above and a button that copies it. Every ThinkWatch Lite release updates the cask as soon as it is published; an hourly job in this repository serves as the fallback.

brew update is part of the command because brew upgrade refreshes taps on its own at most once a day (HOMEBREW_AUTO_UPDATE_SECS). Without it, an outdated copy of this tap would report that the latest version is already installed.

Before the cask is uninstalled, Settings › Full uninstall in the app restores every connected client and turns off launch at login. Removing the app alone does neither, which leaves connected clients pointed at a port where nothing is listening.

brew uninstall --cask thinkwatch-lite

This quits and removes the app, and keeps ~/.thinkwatch, which holds the configuration with the upstream keys, the request history and the keys of remote connections. To remove that directory and the app's other files as well:

brew uninstall --zap --cask thinkwatch-lite

--zap moves those files to the Trash rather than deleting them.