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Mac Appliance Setup

Turn your Mac Studio or Mac Mini into a self-contained AI engineering team. This guide sets up the full OpRelay stack with local inference on Apple Silicon.

What you get​

ComponentRole
OpRelay RuntimeBroker, MCP server, execution engine, dashboard
PostgreSQLPersistent store for all four primitives
OrbStackContainer runtime (lighter than Docker Desktop on macOS)
Ollama (MLX)Local inference on Apple Silicon — no API keys needed

Prerequisites​

  • Mac with Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4 — any variant)
  • 32GB+ unified memory recommended (64GB+ for larger models)
  • OrbStack installed (or Docker Desktop)
  • Ollama installed

1. Install OrbStack​

OrbStack is the recommended container runtime for macOS — faster startup, lower memory overhead, and native Apple Silicon support.

brew install orbstack

2. Install Ollama​

brew install ollama
ollama serve &

# Pull a model for your agents
ollama pull qwen2.5-coder:32b

Ollama now uses MLX natively on Apple Silicon — you get full hardware acceleration without configuration.

3. Start OpRelay​

git clone https://github.com/oprelay/oprelay.git
cd oprelay
docker compose up -d

Your stack is now running:

  • Dashboard: http://localhost:3000
  • MCP endpoint: http://localhost:3000/mcp
  • PostgreSQL: localhost:5432

4. Configure dual-lane​

The Mac appliance shines with dual-lane configuration — human lane for decisions, agent lane for autonomous work.

oprelay.config.json
{
  "lanes": {
    "human": {
      "model": "claude-opus-4",
      "context": "full",
      "approval_required": true
    },
    "agent": {
      "model": "claude-sonnet-4",
      "context": "compressed",
      "approval_required": false,
      "workers": 3
    }
  }
}

5. Connect your agents​

Point Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex at your Mac's MCP endpoint. Each agent registers on connection and receives its lane assignment.

Claude Code — mcp.json
{
  "mcpServers": {
    "oprelay": {
      "url": "http://your-mac.local:3000/mcp",
      "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer your-token" }
    }
  }
}

Network access​

To connect from other machines on your network, your Mac needs to be reachable. OrbStack handles port forwarding automatically. Use your Mac's .local hostname or IP address.

Next steps​