As of March 2022, Rasa is not officially supported on Macs with ARM-based Apple Silicon processors. The solution described here should only be used as a workaround until official support arrives. It has been tested on a Macbook Pro with M1 Processor.

Docker, and native installation is supported. In both cases an Anaconda environment is created in which as many dependencies as possible are installed via pip based on the pyproject.toml of a specific Rasa release. The remaining packages for which no arm64/aarch64 wheels are available on PyPI are fetched from Anaconda channels (conda-forge, noarch, and apple) or from Github repositories that offer precompiled wheels.

At the time of writing, the only dependency that could neither be satisfied from Pip nor Anaconda is tensorflow-text. Therefore, projects that rely on Rasa features utilizing this package will not work.

The easiest way to get started is by using the Docker image.

docker run -it --rm khalosa/rasa-aarch64:latest

Choose one of the available Rasa versions, and store it in an environment variable:

Alternatively, if you want to build the image yourself:

./scripts/build-docker.sh

If you want to run Rasa natively on your Mac with GPU-support, you need to have these tools installed:

• Miniforge, arm64 (Apple Silicon) version
• Python 3 (pip, and python commands must point to a Python3 installation)

Now run this snippet:

# set rasa version
export RASA_VERSION="3.0.8"

# install the small library in this repo
pip install -e ./dependency-converter

# use it to create a conda env file
python -m rasa_dc --platform native --rasa_version $RASA_VERSION

# create a new conda environment from the generated file
conda env create --name rasa-${RASA_VERSION} --file=output/rasa_${RASA_VERSION}_native_env.yml

# finally install Rasa without dependencies into the newly created conda environment
$HOME/miniforge3/envs/rasa-$RASA_VERSION/bin/pip install --no-deps rasa==$RASA_VERSION

Now you should be able to activate the created environment:

conda activate rasa-${RASA_VERSION}

Verify that its working by executing rasa init.