Project end-of-life reached

This project was retired on 2025-03-30. No further support is provided.

Existing binaries will continue to work as they did before, but please decide on your preferred strategy for going forward early on. GnuPG is under active development upstream, so the existing pre-built executables for macOS will eventually become "stale". There have already been several pre-releases in the GnuPG 2.5.x (unstable) series, and I expect the first GnuPG 2.6 (stable) series release some time in 2025.

The GnuPG for OS X / macOS project has been maintained by single individuals for many years now (first Patrick, then me), and the required effort and time investment are no longer feasible for me. Thank you for your interest in this project over the years.

-Ralph Seichter, March 2025-

Alternative GnuPG packages

Different flavours of GnuPG for macOS are available via several package managers. Note that the ordering is purely subjective in nature, and possibly incomplete. Please pick whichever package manager best suits your personal requirements.

1. Nix for macOS, a.k.a. nix-darwin.
2. MacPorts
3. Homebrew

Historical documentation follows

What is it?

GnuPG for OS X / macOS is a collection of free, pre-built binaries of GnuPG 2.x for macOS (previously known as OS X) and the required libraries. The files are bundled as a stand-alone disk image, including an installation package.

Prerequisites

The software bundle requires macOS Sierra (10.12) or newer. Both Intel (x86_64) and ARM CPUs (a.k.a. "Apple Silicon") are supported.

Installation

Please refer to the installation section in this document. Files will be installed in /usr/local/gnupg-2.x (with x being the minor version number) on your system disk, and soft links will be created in /usr/local/bin and /usr/local/lib. Note that the installation process will replace existing links, so I suggest using absolute paths like /usr/local/gnupg-2.4/bin/gpg if you wish to invoke specific versions of GnuPG binaries.

After the installation wizard has succeeded, try running gpg --version in a command shell and check the output. To clean up processes started by a previous version of GnuPG, it is recommended to run gpgconf --kill all, or alternatively to logout/login.

User documentation

Documentation for GnuPG and the differences between the 2.x development lines is available here. Information about mailing lists can be found there as well.

Reporting issues

Please use the project's issue tracker to report possible issues with the software packages.

Comparison with GPGTools

GnuPG for OS X provides cost-free, up-to-date installer packages for the latest GnuPG 2.x versions, containing the standard tools provided by the GnuPG authors ("vanilla" GnuPG). GPGTools comes with a set of additional tools that are specific to macOS, such as a graphical key manager and integration into Apple Mail, but it requires purchasing a support plan.

License

See this document.