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This page walks you through building Open Recorder from source and getting it running on your Mac. Open Recorder is a native Swift app backed by a Rust service, so the build process compiles both components before packaging them into a single .app bundle.

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System requirements

  • macOS — any version that supports Swift 6.2 and the required APIs
  • Apple Silicon or Intel Mac
  • Xcode command-line tools with Swift 6.2 or later
  • Rust 1.93 or later
  • pnpm (for dependency setup)

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Install from source

1

Install prerequisites

Install the Xcode command-line tools if you haven’t already:
Install Rust via rustup:
Confirm your Rust version is 1.93 or later:
2

Clone the repository

3

Install dependencies

This command installs locked JavaScript dependencies and prefetches Rust crates:
4

Build and package the app

Build the Swift app and the Rust service together:
Then package the result into an .app bundle:
This creates Open Recorder.app in /Applications with bundle identifier dev.openrecorder.app.
5

Launch the app

Open /Applications/Open Recorder.app from Finder, or run:
make dev-macos builds, installs, and launches Open Recorder Dev.app — a separate development build that keeps its macOS privacy permission records isolated from the production app, so development and production installs don’t interfere with each other.

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After installation

The first time you open Open Recorder, an onboarding screen guides you through granting the two macOS permissions the app needs before you can start recording. See Permissions for step-by-step instructions.