Install walkthrough

Getting Aldyn onto your Mac

Aldyn isn't distributed through an app store, because it isn't a cloud product — it brings its own database and runs entirely on your machine. We send you the installer directly. Everything below is what actually happens, start to finish, so you know what you're agreeing to before you ask for it.

About 10–15 minutes including prerequisites. Roughly two of those minutes are Aldyn's own install.

What you need first

• macOS 12+ Monterey or later
• Apple Silicon or Intel
• ~10 GB free disk
• An admin user to install into Applications

Two applications have to be on the machine before Aldyn will finish setting itself up. Aldyn bundles everything else — its own app image, Postgres, Redis, config and installer — inside the single .dmg.

1. Docker Desktop — hosts Aldyn's database and services. Install it and leave it running; the whale in the menu bar should be steady, not animated.
2. Claude Desktop with an active Claude subscription (Pro or Max) — this is the AI brain. There is no local model, no API key and no per-token cost.

1. Get the installer

Email info@nrdyn.com and tell us a little about your practice. We'll send you a download link for aldyn-<version>-mac.dmg along with the deployment guide. Copy it to the Mac you'll be running it on.

2. Drag Aldyn into Applications

Double-click the .dmg. A Finder window opens showing the Aldyn icon and an Applications shortcut. Drag Aldyn onto Applications.

Running it straight from the mounted disk image won't work — Aldyn will ask you to move it to Applications first, because it needs a stable location to install itself into.

3. Open it once by right-clicking

Go to your Applications folder, right-click Aldyn and choose Open, then Open again in the dialog that appears.

4. Let the first launch install itself

This takes one to three minutes and shows progress as it goes. Without any input from you, Aldyn:

• verifies Docker Desktop is running, and starts it if it isn't;
• turns on Docker's "start when you sign in" setting, so the stack survives a reboot;
• generates a per-machine session secret;
• loads its bundled container images and starts the stack — aldyn_web, aldyn_worker, aldyn_postgres, aldyn_redis;
• applies the database schema;
• registers the Aldyn MCP server in Claude Desktop's config, keeping a backup of the original.

It then opens http://localhost:8000 and shows a "ready" dialog. Eject the DMG — right-click the disk icon on your desktop and choose Eject.

5. Onboarding: passphrase and mailboxes

The first visit lands you in onboarding.

Set a vault passphrase

At least 8 characters. This encrypts your credentials and taxpayer data at rest, and you'll re-enter it to unlock Aldyn after a restart.

Connect Gmail with an App Password

Aldyn signs in with a Google App Password, never your real password.

1. Turn on 2-Step Verification on the Google account (myaccount.google.com/security).
2. Create an App Password for "Mail" (myaccount.google.com/apppasswords) and copy the 16-character string.
3. Enter the address and App Password in Aldyn. It's verified against IMAP and SMTP before anything is saved, then encrypted locally with your passphrase (PBKDF2 + Fernet).

Optionally add a first business and attorney. Within about 60 seconds the poller starts pulling recent mail from INBOX and [Gmail]/Sent Mail.

Add more mailboxes any time

Settings → Email → Connected Gmail accounts → Add. Every connected inbox flows into one Mail view; each thread shows an account badge, replies go out from the mailbox that received the original, and Compose gets a "From" picker.

6. Start the AI brain

1. Quit and reopen Claude Desktop (⌘Q, then launch it again) so it picks up the Aldyn MCP server that the installer registered.
2. Start a Claude Cowork session and paste in the brain prompt we send with the installer. Leave it running — that session is the continuous brain that triages mail and drains Aldyn's request queue.
3. The "AI brain offline" banner in Aldyn clears once it connects.

7. Check it worked

Managed and scripted deployment

For IT or MDM rollouts there's a non-interactive path that produces an identical result with no Gatekeeper prompts. Run it as the target user — the install writes to their ~/Library and talks to their Docker.

# 1) Place the app
cp -R "/Volumes/Aldyn <version>/Aldyn.app" "/Applications/Aldyn.app"

# 2) Clear the quarantine flag — this is what avoids the Gatekeeper prompt
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/Aldyn.app"

# 3) Run the bundled installer
"/Applications/Aldyn.app/Contents/Resources/app-install.sh"

The installer is idempotent, prints progress to stdout and exits 0 on success. Docker Desktop must be present and running. The DMG also ships a double-clickable Install.command that does the same three steps in a visible Terminal window.

What ends up on the machine

• /Applications/Aldyn.app — the launcher, plus the bundled installer and container images so the app can repair itself. The image tars are around 300 MB and stay inside the bundle by design.
• ~/Library/Application Support/aldyn/ — docker-compose.yml, .env with the session secret, and the Postgres data volume.
• Docker images aldyn-app, pgvector/pgvector:pg16 and redis:7-alpine, running as four containers set to restart: unless-stopped.
• An mcpServers.aldyn entry in Claude Desktop's config, pointing at the MCP server inside the running container.

Backups and uninstalling

Two things make up your data: the Postgres database and the attachments directory. Back both up together.

docker exec aldyn_postgres pg_dump -U aldyn aldyn > backup.sql

To remove Aldyn, double-click Uninstall.command in the DMG and type uninstall to confirm. It stops the stack and removes the app, its config and all of its data — there is no undo, so take a backup first if you might want the case history later.

If something goes wrong

Still stuck? Support, or email info@nrdyn.com — include the version and, if setup failed, /tmp/aldyn-install.log.

Aldyn is proprietary software from Nrdyn LLC and is licensed, not sold. Docker and Docker Desktop are trademarks of Docker, Inc. Claude is a trademark of Anthropic, PBC. Gmail and Google are trademarks of Google LLC. macOS is a trademark of Apple Inc. Aldyn is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any of them, or by the Internal Revenue Service.