Install & setup
Postwright runs on your own machine. Your license email links to a signed macOS installer; run it, paste your key, and the guided setup wires everything up. Most people are running the same day.
What you need
- A Mac with Apple silicon (M1 or later), macOS 14+. Postwright is macOS-oriented — the face-aware crop uses Apple’s Vision framework, and setup helpers assume macOS. The installer bundles its own Node.js runtime, so there’s nothing to preinstall there (running from source instead? You’ll want Node 22+ —
node --version). - ffmpeg & ffprobe on your PATH — only needed for the video Shorts pipeline. The installer checks for what’s missing.
- A folder for your content — any directory works (Obsidian, iA Writer, VS Code, Finder). Postwright watches it.
- Git, if you’ll publish a blog with the Git path (see How publishing works).
The guided installer
Run the installer and it walks you through setup end to end:
- Checks your prerequisites and flags anything missing.
- Asks for your API keys and pastes them into an encrypted store.
- Creates the content directories and writes your configuration.
- Walks you through the one-time platform logins.
- Sets an admin password the first time you open the dashboard.
Prefer the hands-on route? Postwright is a documented self-hosted app — skip the wizard and configure it directly. See Configuration for every setting.
One-time platform logins
During setup you connect the platforms you want to publish to. LinkedIn is a single browser login; YouTube and the Meta platforms use API credentials you set up once. The Social platforms page lists exactly what each one needs.
Where your data lives
Everything runs locally. Your footage, transcripts, subscriber list, and logged-in sessions stay on your machine — there’s no Postwright server in the middle. Secrets go into an encrypted credential store, not a plaintext file, in a packaged install.