How to install EncFS on macOS Sequoia
How to access my old encrypted files even though EncFS is no longer supported in Homebrew for macOS.
- Start by installing a third-party formula that some nice people maintain:
brew install gromgit/fuse/encfs-mac
- Immediately get disappointed when it fails. Turns out it requires openssl@1.1 which has been deprecated by Homebrew:
==> Fetching dependencies for gromgit/fuse/encfs-mac: openssl@1.1 Error: openssl@1.1 has been disabled because it is not supported upstream! It was disabled on 2024-10-24.
How to install the (no longer supported) openssl@1.1 formula.
- Force the download of the core formula repository:
brew tap --force homebrew/core
- Edit the formula and remove the deprecation enforcement:
brew edit openssl@1.1
Comment out line 29, so it looks like:#disable! date: "2024-10-24", because: :unsupported
- Perform installation of openssl@1.1 from the locally modified formula:
HOMEBREW_NO_INSTALL_FROM_API=1 brew install openssl@1.1
Now we can install EncFS successfully.
brew install gromgit/fuse/encfs-mac ==> Fetching gromgit/fuse/encfs-mac ==> Downloading https://github.com/gromgit/homebrew-fuse/releases/download/encfs-mac-1.9.5/encfs-mac-1.9.5.arm64_monterey.bottle.tar.gz ==> Downloading from https://objects.githubusercontent.com/github-production-release-asset-[...] ==> Installing encfs-mac from gromgit/fuse ==> Pouring encfs-mac-1.9.5.arm64_monterey.bottle.tar.gz ==> Downloading https://formulae.brew.sh/api/cask.jws.json 🍺 /opt/homebrew/Cellar/encfs-mac/1.9.5: 65 files, 2.2MB ==> Running `brew cleanup encfs-mac`...
If desired, we can now run brew untap homebrew/core to cleanup the local copy of the formula repository.
Next step is to enable the (earlier installed) MacFuse kernel extension.
On macOS Sequoia this is a quite complicated process (needs disabling of multiple security features and some reboots).
Luckily the people from the MacFuse project have compiled a nice illustrated guide.
After this process is completed, we can finally decrypt the EncFS files.
encfs -v -f ./encrypted-folder ./mountpoint
The unencrypted files are available at ./mountpoint.
In my case I copied them to another folder as I no longer intend to use EncFS.
With the job done, I removed again all the EncFS software and re-enabled the security features of macOS.
brew uninstall encfs-mac brew uninstall openssl@1.1 brew uninstall macfuse
Then reboot into the Recovery environment and in the Startup Security Utility set the Security Policy again to Full Security. 🔐