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Archil for macOS makes it simple to use Archil disks from a macOS machine. It lives in the menu-bar and supports mounting disks with FSKit, so it doesn’t require any additional kernel modules. Archil for macOS only works on macOS 26 (Tahoe) and later.
Archil for macOS is intended for debugging and testing — browsing files, inspecting data, and validating changes from your laptop. It is not suitable for benchmarking. You’ll always get the best performance by mounting a disk from a Linux client running in the same cloud region as the disk, where round-trip latency to the data source is measured in microseconds rather than the tens of milliseconds typical of a home or office network.

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Install

Run the following on your machine to install Archil.app:

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First launch

1

Sign in

Click the Archil icon in your menu bar and choose Sign in to Archil. Enter the email address associated with your Archil account, then enter the verification code we send you. Your session persists across restarts.
2

Pick a disk

Once you’re signed in, the menu bar lists every disk you have access to — both your personal disks and any disks shared with you through an organization. Disks are grouped by region.If you don’t have a disk yet, create one in the Archil console and click Refresh Disks in the menu.
3

Mount it

Click any disk and choose Mount. Archil mounts the disk as a native macOS volume, opens it in Finder, and adds a shortcut to your Finder sidebar. From there, you can browse, edit, and copy files just like any other folder.
4

Unmount when you're done

To unmount cleanly, click the disk in the menu bar and choose Unmount. Archil waits for any pending writes to flush to your data source before disconnecting. Quitting the app unmounts every active volume automatically.

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Latency indicators

You get the best performance with Archil disks by using either Serverless execution or by mounting from the same cloud region. As a result, we expect performance degradation when mounting Archil from a local macOS machine that increases based on the amount of latency to your cloud region. We show you a latency indicator in the menu bar, so you know the scale of degradation to expect.

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Using delegations

When you mount through the menu bar, Archil disks are mounted in shared mode, which means that some write functions of the file system are unavailable by default. For specific information on how to work with shared disks, see Shared Disks. (If you mount from the command line, you can choose between shared and exclusive mode.) You can “check-out” a file or folder for writing by right-clicking it in Finder and selecting “Check out”. An indicator will appear on the file in Finder to show that it’s available for writing. When you’re done working with the folder or file, you can right-click it and select “Check in”.

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Command line

Once you’ve installed the app and signed in at least once, you can mount and unmount disks from the terminal instead of the menu bar — useful for scripts and automation. The first launch installs a small mount helper and a passwordless rule so these commands don’t prompt for a password on every mount.
The command-line interface on macOS is unstable and subject to change — the helper path, URL format, and flags may change in any release. We’re actively working to make this a first-class, supported interface. For anything you depend on, prefer the menu bar, or mount from a Linux client where the archil CLI is fully supported.

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Mount

The mount source is an archil:// URL with these parts:
  • <region> — the disk’s region, e.g. aws-us-east-1. See Regions.
  • <owner>/<disk-name> — the owner-qualified disk name. Use your email for a personal disk, or your organization ID for a disk shared through an organization.
  • token — a disk token that authorizes mounting this disk. Create one in the console or with disk create (the token is shown once — save it).
  • shared — true mounts read-only, matching the menu bar; write to files by checking them out in Finder. false mounts in exclusive mode, so reads and writes work directly from the command line. Use false only when no other client needs to write to the disk at the same time. See Shared Disks.
The mount point must be under /Volumes/.
The easiest way to get the exact URL — including the disk token — is to mount the disk once from the menu bar, then copy the source from the mount table:

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Unmount

As with the menu bar, unmounting flushes any pending writes to your data source before disconnecting. Quitting the app unmounts every active volume automatically.
macOS (FSKit) doesn’t let you mount the same disk twice on one Mac — for example, from both the menu bar and the command line. The second mount fails with Resource busy. Mounting the same disk from different machines is fully supported; see Shared Disks.

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Sharing data with Linux servers

Disks mounted on your Mac are the same disks you can mount from Linux servers using the archil CLI. Files you create or edit on macOS are immediately visible to any other client mounting the same disk, with full POSIX semantics. See Shared Disks for details on concurrent access from multiple clients.