Install

Foil runs on Apple Silicon Macs (M-series) with macOS Ventura or later. Intel Macs are not supported — MLX requires Apple's unified memory.

Option A — DMG

1. Download Foil.dmg from the releases page
2. Open the DMG and drag Foil into Applications
3. Launch Foil from Applications — the tray icon appears in the menu bar
4. On first run, the app creates ~/.foil/venv/, downloads the default model, and starts the local server on port 9090

Option B — Homebrew (reccomended)

brew tap peachstudio/foil
brew install --cask foil

The cask installs the same app bundle as the DMG and handles upgrades via brew upgrade.

Requirements

• macOS Ventura (13+) or later, Apple Silicon only
• ~10 GB free disk for the default model
• Homebrew Python 3.11+ is not required for the DMG install — the app ships its own isolated venv under ~/.foil/venv/
• Brew and other 2 libraries for PDF generation are required, if you don't have your PDF generation capabilities will be reduced

First-run checklist

After Foil starts:

• Click the tray icon → Open dashboard to confirm the web UI is up on http://localhost:9090
• Run foil server status from a terminal — you should see a healthy server and loaded model
• Run foil scan path/to/your/project to kick off the first scan

If anything fails, foil server logs --lines 200 is the fastest way to see what went wrong.

See the Quick start for a walkthrough of the first scan.