A Homebrew tap for macOS applications that are unsigned or unnotarized — and therefore rejected by the official Homebrew/homebrew-cask repository.
Why this tap exists
Apple requires developers to pay $99/year for a Developer ID certificate and submit every release to Apple's notarization service before macOS will run it without warnings. Homebrew Cask enforces this gate by refusing to host any cask that fails a Gatekeeper check — not because the software is broken or malicious, but purely because it lacks Apple's paid stamp of approval.
The result: perfectly functional, well-maintained open-source applications get quietly dropped from Homebrew the moment their maintainers miss a notarization step or choose not to pay Apple's annual fee. Users who relied on those casks lose them with no warning.
This tap says no to that. It hosts the rejected casks, automatically strips the quarantine attribute after installation so apps launch normally, and keeps definitions up to date. You own your Mac. You decide what runs on it.
Note: "Unsigned" and "unnotarized" mean the developer has not paid Apple for a signing certificate or run the binary through Apple's notarization pipeline — not that the software is inherently untrustworthy. As with any software, use your own judgement: check the upstream project, read the cask definition in
Casks/, and decide for yourself.
Quickstart
# 1. Add this tap brew tap SoftwareRat/unsigned-tap # 2. Install a cask (example: Alacritty) brew install --cask alacritty # 3. Or install using the fully-qualified name brew install --cask SoftwareRat/unsigned-tap/alacritty # 4. Keep casks up to date brew update && brew upgrade --cask
Available Casks
This tap tracks the full upstream set of casks that were disabled because of
fails_gatekeeper_check and keeps them installable here.
Browse all current entries in Casks/.
# List all tokens in this tap ls Casks | sed 's/\.rb$//'
Popular Casks in this Tap
These are examples of widely known apps available here, to show why this tap is practically useful:
- alacritty
- qbittorrent
- chromium
- chromedriver
- darktable
- flameshot
- freetube
- librewolf
- copyq
- lyx
- texstudio
- qownnotes
- qlmarkdown
- wine-stable
- gstreamer-runtime
Removing a Cask
# Remove an installed cask brew uninstall --cask alacritty # Remove this tap entirely brew untap SoftwareRat/unsigned-tap
Contributing
If a cask you use was removed from Homebrew Cask due to a Gatekeeper rejection, feel free to open a pull request adding it here. Please include the upstream source URL, the reason for the Gatekeeper failure, and a working cask definition.