I love password gorilla. It’s a portable locally hosted password manager that is compatible with passwordsafe. It has all the features I need in a password manager:

• account groups
• password generation
• metadata storage (so you can add a note)
• keyboard shortcuts for copy and pasting the url, username, and password
• local storage of secrets

It doesn’t have fancy integration with browsers, remote backup or TOTP, but I don’t need these. For browser integration, I use the clipboard. For remote backup, pwsafe files can be copied anywhere. And for TOTP, the whole point of MFA is that each factor is separate.

But recently, I started setting up an Apple M1 machine, and the password gorilla downloads failed to start. I looked at the github issues of the repository and didn’t find a ton of help, though there were some related issues.

After some poking around, here’s what I did that worked for running password gorilla on my Apple M1:

• installed tcl-tk using brew: brew install tcl-tk
• cloned the password gorilla repository: git clone https://github.com/zdia/gorilla.git
• wrote a small shell script and added the directory where it lived to my path.

#!/bin/sh

cd <cloned repository directory>/sources
/opt/homebrew/opt/tcl-tk/bin/tclsh gorilla.tcl

That’s it. After I did this, I can run this script any time and password gorilla starts right up.