Install and update

Lily DB runs on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, on Apple silicon and Intel Macs (it ships as a universal app). On macOS 26 it uses Liquid Glass; on earlier versions it falls back to the standard materials.

Download

1. Get the DMG from the Lily DB page.
2. Open it and drag Lily DB to Applications.
3. Open Lily DB from Applications.

The app is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so macOS opens it without warnings. It is free for personal and commercial use.

First launch

The first time you open Lily, a short tour of seven chapters introduces the app. Two of them ask you something:

• Lend a paw has two switches, both off: sharing failures with the developer and an anonymous daily usage count. Leave them off if you prefer. See Privacy.
• Your AI sidekick looks for the AI command-line tools on your Mac (Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, OpenCode). You can skip it and set up AI later.

Skip tour jumps to the last chapter. You can replay the tour from Settings › About › Replay onboarding.

After the tour, the connection manager opens. If you just want to look around, the card A tiny database. A big first step. opens a sample SQLite store (customers, products, orders) as a read-only connection.

Updates

Lily updates itself with Sparkle. It checks once a day by default.

• Lily DB › Check for Updates… checks right away.
• Settings › About › Updates has two switches: Automatically check for updates and Download updates automatically. With the second one on, an update downloads in the background and installs when you quit.

Every update is verified against the Developer ID signature before it installs. The first time you open a new version, What's New shows what changed. You can read every release on the release notes page.

Where Lily keeps things

What	Where
Connections, history, saved queries, notebooks, dashboards, caches	~/Library/Application Support/db.cortex/
Passwords, secret keys, SSH passphrases	macOS Keychain, service db.cortex.connections

The folder and bundle id still say db.cortex because Lily DB was called Cortex DB before version 0.2.3. Keeping the old identifiers is what let updates carry your data over.

Uninstall

1. Quit Lily DB and move it from Applications to the Trash.
2. To remove your data too, delete ~/Library/Application Support/db.cortex/.
3. To remove saved passwords, open Keychain Access and delete the items named db.cortex.connections.

If you turned on iCloud sync, use Turn off and remove my copy from iCloud before uninstalling.