Installing Distiller

Installing Distiller

Requirements

• An Apple silicon Mac with macOS 14 or later. macOS 27 is recommended for Apple's Game Porting Toolkit 4 (D3DMetal).
• Rosetta, which today's Wine builds for macOS need. Distiller installs it for you (macOS asks for an administrator password).
• Disk space for Wine builds (a few hundred MB each) and games. Bottles can live on an external drive (APFS or Mac OS Extended).

Download

1. Download Distiller.dmg. It's signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple.
2. Open it and drag Distiller to Applications.
3. Open Distiller from Applications.

All releases have notes and a SHA256SUMS.txt with the disk image's checksum. Once installed, Distiller can update itself (see Updating Distiller).

First run: the Setup Assistant

The Setup Assistant opens by itself when something Distiller needs is missing. You can open it any time from Distiller ▸ Setup Assistant… or the Setup Assistant button in Components.

1. Where to keep things

First it asks where to keep Wine builds and bottles: in Distiller's support folder (~/Library/Application Support/Distiller), or somewhere with more room, such as an external drive. Locations must be APFS or Mac OS Extended, and not case-sensitive. Bottles and their templates are kept together, because a new bottle is an instant clone of a template, and clones only work within one drive. Choose Use These Locations; you can move them later (see Bottles and storage).

2. What Distiller needs

Then it checks for, and offers to install:

Item	Required	How it's installed
Rosetta	Yes	Apple's installer (softwareupdate --install-rosetta); macOS asks for an administrator password.
Wine	Yes	The latest Wine Staging build for macOS (or Wine Devel, chosen with Build), downloaded from its publisher's GitHub releases and checked against the published SHA-256 checksum.
winetricks	Yes	The winetricks script from the latest Winetricks release.
cabextract	Optional	brew install cabextract, if Homebrew is installed. Some winetricks components need it.
DXMT, DXVK	Optional	Open-source graphics layers, downloaded from their publishers' releases.
D3DMetal	Optional	Apple's graphics layer. Distiller never downloads it: Apple's licence requires you to download the Game Porting Toolkit yourself. Open Apple's Download Page, sign in with your Apple Account, download the disk image, then Import Disk Image….

Install Everything Missing installs everything that doesn't need your help, in order. Each item also has its own button. Most newer games need D3DMetal or DXMT; many older ones work with DXVK or WineD3D.

From a terminal: distiller setup shows the status, and distiller setup install --all installs what's missing (see Command line).

Updating Distiller

Distiller checks for a newer version of itself when it checks for component updates (when it starts and once a day, unless you turned checks off), and you can check any time with Distiller ▸ Check for Updates…. A new version is announced once, with Install and Relaunch, Release Notes and Later; it's also shown in Settings ▸ Updates until you install it.

Install and Relaunch:

1. downloads the release's Distiller.dmg;
2. checks it against the release's published checksums;
3. checks that the app inside is Distiller, at the version the release says, with a valid signature from the same developer as your copy, and accepted by macOS (Developer ID, notarized);
4. moves your current copy to the Trash, puts the new one in its place, and reopens it.

If any check fails, nothing is installed and Distiller says why. If Distiller can't replace itself where it is (for example, it was opened straight from the disk image, or its folder isn't writable), it opens the checked disk image so you can drag Distiller to Applications yourself. It won't update while a game, an install or a community check is running.

Updates come from the GitHub releases of the repository your copy was built from. A copy built from a fork updates from that fork, and copies signed by different developers never replace each other.

From a terminal: distiller app check says whether there's a newer version, and distiller app download downloads it and runs every check without installing it.

Building from source

You need Xcode 16 or later (for the Swift toolchain and macOS SDK).

git clone https://github.com/nullfx/distiller.git
cd distiller
swift build
swift test
swift run DistillerApp        # opens the app without bundling it
Scripts/bundle-app.sh         # builds and signs dist/Distiller.app
swift run distiller --help    # the command-line tool

Set DISTILLER_HOME=/tmp/distiller-dev while experimenting, to keep test bottles and settings away from your real library. AGENTS.md in the repository explains the architecture and the rules for contributors.