Nightly Builds

Nightly builds are for testers who want the latest successful main build before the next beta tag. They are short-lived GitHub Actions artifacts, not signed releases, not Homebrew packages, and not guaranteed to be stable.

Use Homebrew or beta releases for normal installation. Use nightlies when you are validating a fix, trying fresh behavior, or helping test the next release.

Download from GitHub

The Nightly workflow publishes macOS artifacts after tests, vet, package builds, and binary smoke checks pass. Pick the artifact that matches your Mac.

Open Actions > Nightly.
Select the latest successful run.
Scroll to Artifacts.
Download herald-nightly-darwin-arm64 for Apple Silicon or herald-nightly-darwin-amd64 for Intel.
Unzip the downloaded artifact.
Optionally verify the checksum file.
Extract the included .tar.gz.

shasum -a 256 -c *.sha256
tar -xzf herald-nightly-*.tar.gz

The extracted folder contains herald, herald-mcp-server, and herald-ssh-server.

Download with GitHub CLI

The GitHub CLI is the quickest path if you already have repository access configured. The example downloads the latest Apple Silicon artifact.

run_id="$(gh run list --repo herald-email/herald-mail-app --workflow Nightly --limit 1 --json databaseId --jq '.[0].databaseId')"
gh run download "$run_id" --repo herald-email/herald-mail-app --name herald-nightly-darwin-arm64

For Intel Macs, use herald-nightly-darwin-amd64 as the artifact name.

Nightly Channel Rules

Nightly builds are disposable test-channel builds. They use separate Google OAuth defaults from beta and stable release builds, and artifacts are retained for 14 days.

They do not create Git tags.
They do not update beta-latest.
They do not update Homebrew.
They do not publish GitHub Releases.
Their binary version looks like nightly-YYYYMMDD-<commit>.

macOS Warning

Nightly binaries are direct downloads from GitHub Actions. They are not Developer ID signed or notarized yet, so macOS Gatekeeper may warn before the packaging milestone adds signing.