Installing yabai (latest release)

A codesigned binary release of yabai can be installed using Homebrew from the tap koekeishiya/formulae.

brew install koekeishiya/formulae/yabai

Open System Preferences.app and navigate to Security & Privacy, then Privacy, then Accessibility. Click the lock icon at the bottom and enter your password to allow changes to the list. Starting with brew services start yabai will prompt the user to allow yabai accessibility permissions. Check the box next to yabai to allow accessibility permissions.

If you disabled System Integrity Protection; configure the scripting addition. Afterwards simply start yabai.

# start yabai
brew services start yabai

Updating to the latest release

To update yabai to the latest version, simply upgrade it with Homebrew and reconfigure the scripting addition:

# stop yabai
brew services stop yabai

# upgrade yabai
brew upgrade yabai

# start yabai
brew services start yabai

Configure scripting addition

yabai uses the macOS Mach APIs to inject code into Dock.app; this requires elevated (root) privileges. You can configure your user to execute yabai --load-sa as the root user without having to enter a password. To do this, we add a new configuration entry that is loaded by /etc/sudoers.

# create a new file for writing - visudo uses the vim editor by default.
# go read about this if you have no idea what is going on.

sudo visudo -f /private/etc/sudoers.d/yabai

# input the line below into the file you are editing.
#  replace <yabai> with the path to the yabai binary (output of: which yabai).
#  replace <user> with your username (output of: whoami). 
#  replace <hash> with the sha256 hash of the yabai binary (output of: shasum -a 256 $(which yabai)).
#   this hash must be updated manually after running brew upgrade.

<user> ALL = (root) NOPASSWD: sha256:<hash> <yabai> --load-sa

After the above edit has been made, add the command to load the scripting addition at the top of your yabairc config file

# for this to work you must configure sudo such that
# it will be able to run the command without password

yabai -m signal --add event=dock_did_restart action="sudo yabai --load-sa"
sudo yabai --load-sa

# .. more yabai startup stuff