I recently had to set up remote login support on a Mac. To enable Remote login

  • Open the System Settings app
  • Select the General section
  • Select the Sharing option
  • Click the slider to enable Remote Login

from here you can access your Mac with ssh via the Mac’s ip address or it’s local domain name.

Depending on what you are doing you may notice fairly quickly that certain actions will return ‘Operation Not Permitted’ messages. For me this was any application or script that attempted to access a protected folder like the user downloads folder.

Something as simple as ls ~/Downloads would return Operation Not Permitted. To prevent these errors you must go back to the Sharing settings dialog in the System Settings app and click the information button (the circle with the i in it).

Clicking this button will present a dialog with the option Allow full disk access for remote users. Enable this option and your terminal sessions should no longer see the Operation Not Permitted error. You may have to exit your current session if any of your login scripts require files in a protected folder.

These notes are current as of macOS Ventura 13.4.1 and may change. If you cannot find the settings in the same location you can use the System Settings app’s search feature.