Seabolt support for M1

As part of building Chimera, an AppleOS tool for capturing networked knowledge, thoughts, and ideas, I encountered an issue trying to set up Neo4j on an M1 laptop (i.e. arm64 architecture). It turns out that Seabolt, the connector that neo4j-ruby-driver uses to communicate with a running instance of Neo4j, doesn’t have support for M1s. It was a bit of a bummer, but luckily I found this fork that someone created to add support.

If you run into this same issue in the future, you can either run the steps on that repository or download the compiled version that I built myself. Here is the sha256 checksum to validate you downloaded the correct binary.

shasum -a 256 seabolt-1.7.4-dev-Darwin.tar.gz

Once you verify the binary is correct, you can untar the content, and copy the dynamic library into the directory where the driver expects it:

cd build/dist/lib
cp libseabolt17.dylib /usr/local/lib/libseabolt17.dylib

And that would be it. The Neo4j Ruby driver should be able to initialize successfully.

A note on Chimera

It’s the first time I mention Chimera, so you might be wondering what’s that tool. You are probably familiar with tools for capturing networked notes like Roam Research and Obsidian. They are great because they remove the friction of giving your ideas, knowledge, and thoughts a structure other than the one they have in your brain. However, they are designed and optimized for the web. If you try to use them from your phone, the user experience is terrible. And because ideas can arise at any time, and you usually have your phone with you, I think having an app optimized for native will take the experience of capturing them to a whole new level. So that’s what I set out to build; a tool for networked thoughts, ideas, and knowledge. I’ll focus on Apple platforms first, following their human interface guidelines. I’m very excited to use Tuist myself and learn about SwiftUI to make this happen.