Setting up the Mac that runs Pepper

Pepper runs on one always-on Mac, usually a Mac mini. Install it with the install guide; this page covers the settings on the Mac, so Pepper keeps running through idle nights, power cuts and restarts. Change them in System Settings, or let npm run setup power apply the power settings after asking you. npm run doctor, Pepper's health check, reports on them in its host line.

Any Mac with Apple Silicon, as long as it is used only for Pepper; a laptop is only good for testing. The base Mac mini, with 16 GB of memory and a 256 GB drive, is enough. Memory use measured on an M6 Mac mini on 2026-10-29, with Beeper (the app that brings your chats together), Pepper, its voice, transcription and search workers and the phone line (Pepper answering calls) all running:

Add them all up when memory use is highest and a 16 GB Mac still has room. Disk space is less of a concern: Pepper, Beeper and the three local models for voice, transcription and search take about 6 GB, and a month of Pepper's data is under 100 MB.

What does not fit is other work on the same Mac: a browser with many tabs, virtual machines, a photo library being indexed, or a local language model, which Pepper does not run. On the test Mac, Apple Intelligence used about 1 GB of memory; turning it off in System Settings frees that.

In System Settings -> Energy:

Or in Terminal: sudo pmset -a sleep 0 disksleep 0 autorestart 1 womp 1.

The display still turns off after a while (10 minutes by default), and that is fine: Pepper needs the Mac awake, not the screen. If it keeps going dark while you set things up, keep it on until you close the Terminal tab:

caffeinate -d

Press Control-C to stop it. To change the delay for good, use System Settings -> Lock Screen -> Turn display off when inactive.

On a laptop, npm run doctor passes the host check with a note, without looking at these settings.

Beeper Desktop, Pepper and the phone line all run inside your macOS login. Lock the screen instead of logging out: logging out stops everything until someone logs back in. On a Mac with a second user for Pepper's iMessage, see the guide to Pepper's iMessage user for switching users safely.

With FileVault on (Apple's disk encryption, recommended so a lost Mac gives away none of your data), a Mac that restarts waits at the FileVault screen. Nothing runs until someone types the password at the keyboard. After a power cut or a macOS update, unlock it once and log in; Pepper then starts by itself, and so does Beeper if you set it to open at login (System Settings -> General -> Login Items). Check with /status in Pepper's Telegram chat.

For a restart you plan, unlock ahead of time so the Mac comes back up on its own:

sudo fdesetup authrestart

Install macOS updates by hand, when you can check on Pepper afterwards. In System Settings -> General -> Software Update -> Automatic updates, leave "Install macOS updates" off.

To run commands on the Mac from your laptop, turn on System Settings -> General -> Sharing -> Remote Login and sign in with an SSH key rather than a password. Screen Sharing in the same pane lets you see its screen.

Keep System Settings -> Network -> Firewall on. If you add the phone line, its guide names the one app to allow.