chatwire 1.6.0

macOS chat-relay bridge: iMessage <-> Telegram, web UI, and pluggable integrations

chatwire

Access your iMessages from anywhere — your phone, your laptop, your browser, wherever you are. A lightweight bridge that runs on your Mac and gives you a web UI, a Telegram relay, push notifications, and a plugin system for extending it however you want.

This is the product Apple should have come out with years ago. iMessage is the best messaging platform out there, but Apple locks it to their devices and offers no remote access, no API, no way to check your messages when you're away from your Mac. chatwire fixes that.

Status: beta — actively looking for testers. The author runs this daily and it's stable, but you'll be among the first to install it on a fresh machine. If you hit a wall, open an issue. See docs/OPEN_SOURCE_PLAN.md for the roadmap.

What it does

• Inbound. A lightweight Python service watches ~/Library/Messages/chat.db, resolves senders against Contacts.app, and forwards messages (text, photos, videos, attachments) to your configured integrations.
• Outbound. Reply from anywhere — your phone, a browser tab, a Telegram chat. The service drives Messages.app via AppleScript to send back as you.
• Group chats. First-class support. Replies route by chat GUID so group conversations stay intact across surfaces.
• Plugins. Extend chatwire with notification services (ntfy, Pushover), messaging stats, favorites, and more. Plugins get auto-generated settings sections in the web UI. Build your own or install community plugins with pipx inject.

Requirements

iMessage is Mac-only, so the bridge needs a Mac with your Apple ID logged into Messages.app. macOS requires two permission grants — Full Disk Access (to read chat.db) and Automation→Messages (to send). The setup wizard walks you through both, but you will click through a couple of system prompts on first run.

Tested on macOS 12 Monterey. macOS 13-15 should work. Run chatwire doctor to verify your system is ready.

Install

Recommended path: pipx, against python.org's Python.

# Install python.org Python first if you don't have it:
#   https://www.python.org/downloads/macos/
# (Homebrew Python works but TCC treats it as a different identity —
# you'd have to grant Full Disk Access + Automation to that binary
# specifically. python.org is the well-trodden path.)

# Install pipx if you don't have it (once per machine):
python3 -m pip install --user pipx
python3 -m pipx ensurepath

# Install chatwire from PyPI:
pipx install --python /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin/python3 \
    chatwire

# Wire it up:
chatwire install-agents
chatwire setup

The setup wizard walks you through the macOS permission grants (Full Disk Access + Automation→Messages), identity, contact whitelist, and optional web UI password. It writes ~/.chatwire/config.json.

Alternate install methods

Homebrew tap. Convenient if you already use brew.

brew install allenbina/tap/chatwire
chatwire install-agents
chatwire setup

Tap source: https://github.com/allenbina/homebrew-tap.

curl-pipe-bash. No PyPI access, no Homebrew, just a shell.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/allenbina/chatwire/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Pin to a specific version with CHATWIRE_REF=v1.1.0. The script refuses Xcode CLT's Python stub and warns on Homebrew Python (TCC identity protection). Same post-install steps (chatwire install-agents etc.).

Developer / git-clone path. For hacking on the bridge itself:

git clone https://github.com/allenbina/chatwire.git ~/projects/chatwire
cd ~/projects/chatwire
python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e .

# Render and load the launchd agents:
.venv/bin/chatwire install-agents

# Sanity check:
.venv/bin/chatwire doctor

The setup wizard writes ~/.chatwire/config.json (chmod 600) for you. For manual edits or headless installs, see docs/REFERENCE_INSTALL.md.

macOS permissions

Both the FDA grant and the Automation→Messages grant need to be given to the python.org Python binary (not Homebrew's), because the python.org installer ships two Mach-O binaries with different code-signing identities that TCC tracks separately. See docs/REFERENCE_INSTALL.md section 5 for the full walkthrough — that section was the reason the bridge worked at all on the first install, and it's the same on every Mac.

scripts/check-permissions.sh (or chatwire doctor) will tell you which prompts you still need to click.

Web UI access

By default the web UI has no auth — anyone who can reach the URL can read and send messages. The intended posture is to gate access at the network layer (Tailscale, LAN-only, Cloudflare Access, etc.).

For setups where the URL leaks past that boundary, the wizard's Security step (or Settings → Web UI password) sets an optional shared password. It's a single password (not multi-user) stored as a PBKDF2-SHA256 hash in ~/.chatwire/config.json; sessions are signed cookies that expire after 30 days. Forgot it? Stop the web agent, edit config.json (already chmod 600), drop the web.auth block, restart.

Privacy

Zero telemetry. Period. chatwire collects no analytics, sends no usage data, phones home to nobody, and includes no third-party SDKs that report back. You run this on your own hardware and your data stays on your hardware. Your messages, contacts, and chat.db never leave your Mac — outbound traffic only goes to integrations you explicitly configure (your Telegram bot, your ntfy server, etc.).

Two narrow third-party requests the web UI makes, neither carrying any of your data:

• An update-check fetches api.github.com/repos/<repo>/releases/latest once a day to surface new-version notices. Disable by setting UPDATE_CHECK_REPO="" in the launchd agent's environment.
• Static assets (htmx, emoji-picker-element) load from unpkg.com and cdn.jsdelivr.net.

Repo layout

bridge.py             message relay loop + integration dispatcher
chat_db.py            reads chat.db, HEIC -> JPEG via sips
chat_send.py          osascript wrappers (send_text, send_file)
config.py             config.json loader
chatwire_cli.py       CLI: setup / install-agents / doctor / logs / migrate
contacts.py           Contacts.app -> handle/name lookup
echo_log.py           cross-process echo dedup
whitelist.py          runtime-mutable contact allowlist
_version.py           semver source of truth
integrations/         built-in plugins (web, webhook, stats, favorites)
web/                  FastAPI web UI + setup wizard + plugin settings
migrations/           config-schema migration runner
templates/launchd/    plist templates rendered by install-agents
scripts/              install.sh, chatwire-loop.sh (dev automation)
docs/                 OPEN_SOURCE_PLAN.md, REFERENCE_INSTALL.md, HANDOFF.md

Trademarks

iMessage, Messages, macOS, and AppleScript are trademarks of Apple Inc., referenced here in their descriptive sense — this project relays to and from Apple's iMessage service. chatwire is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Apple Inc.

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Copy it, fork it, put your thang down, flip it, and reverse it. Just follow the MIT requirements and give credit to the original project.

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome. Whether it's a bug fix, a new feature, or a whole plugin — get involved. Check the plugin system docs if you want to build an integration, or browse the open issues to find something to pick up.

Looking for beta testers. If you have a Mac with iMessage and want to try chatwire, open an issue with your setup details and we'll get you running.

Sponsors

If chatwire is useful to you, consider sponsoring the project.