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anonymizer

Install on macOS

Desktop app

The native macOS application is the easiest way to use anonymizer on a Mac: a signed and notarized DMG (~81 MB) for Apple Silicon (M1 or newer), macOS 13+.

Download for macOS — drag to Applications and launch; no warnings, no terminal.

Language models are installed on demand from Settings → Languages (one click per language), and the app updates itself automatically. Document processing is exactly as local as the CLI: files never leave your machine.

The CLI below remains available and is fully independent of the app — use whichever fits, or both.

Quick install (CLI)

Terminal window
curl -fsSL anonymizer.site/install | sh

This downloads and runs the install script (anonymizer.site/install) which installs the tool via uv under your user account. No sudo required. No system Python is touched.

During install, the script also offers optional Tesseract OCR setup for scanned and hybrid PDFs. If you skip it, .docx, .xlsx, and PDFs with a text layer still work; scanned PDFs are rejected with setup guidance until OCR is ready.

After install, run:

Terminal window
anonymize

Your browser opens at http://127.0.0.1:<port>.

Where it installs

  • ~/.local/share/uv/tools/docs-anonymizer/ — the wheel and its dependencies
  • ~/.local/bin/anonymize — the launcher executable

To uninstall: uv tool uninstall docs-anonymizer.

Verify the install script before running

The install script is hosted at https://anonymizer.site/install and is rebuilt on every release. To verify before piping into a shell:

Terminal window
curl -fsSL anonymizer.site/install | shasum -a 256

Compare against the SHA256 published in the latest release.

Requirements

  • macOS 12 (Monterey) or newer
  • ~1.5 GB free disk (spaCy + Natasha models bundled)
  • Optional OCR for scans: Homebrew Tesseract plus tesseract-lang. Homebrew’s language package is large because it bundles many languages; expect up to roughly 720 MB on disk.

Manual OCR install:

Terminal window
brew install tesseract tesseract-lang
anonymize doctor --no-network

Updating

The product self-updates via an in-app banner. No need to re-run the installer. See Updates for the mechanism.