Docs: Apple Silicon macOS needs Rosetta 2 (only x86_64 ht-macos binary is published)

[shekiaya-nyarko]

Summary

On Apple Silicon Macs, installing the CLI (via install.sh or a direct GitHub release download) lands the x86_64 ht-macos binary. Running it then fails on a machine without Rosetta 2:

bad CPU type in executable: ht

The docs don't mention this, so the failure is surprising on M-series Macs.

Why it happens

• The latest release (v0.1.1) publishes a single macOS asset, ht-macos (x86_64, 76,296,794 bytes). There is no arm64 / aarch64 macOS binary, and the checksums file is sha256sum-amd64.txt only.
• install.sh intentionally maps arm64 → amd64 on Darwin (around lines 74–76), since there's no native build to point at. So the installed binary is always x86_64 on macOS.
• Without Rosetta 2 present, an x86_64 binary cannot execute on Apple Silicon.

Reproduction

1. Fresh Apple Silicon Mac (no Rosetta installed).
2. curl -sLf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/hightouchio/cli/main/install.sh | sh -
3. ht --version → bad CPU type in executable: ht

Suggested fix (docs)

Add a note to the README Quick Start install section:

Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4) macOS: Hightouch ships a single x86_64 macOS binary (ht-macos) — there is no native arm64 build. On Apple Silicon the binary needs Rosetta 2, or ht fails with bad CPU type in executable. Install it once:

softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

(Ideally, also publishing a native arm64 macOS binary would remove the Rosetta requirement entirely.)

Environment

• macOS, arm64
• After installing Rosetta 2: ht --version → ht/0.1.0 darwin-x64 node-v16.16.0 (works)