Installation
idb is made up of 2 parts, both of which are installed by a single brew formula.
idb companion
The companion runs on macOS only, next to the Simulators and Devices it automates. Each target (simulator/device) will have a companion process attached, allowing idb to communicate with it remotely.
The idb companion can be installed via brew or built from source:
brew install facebook/fb/idb
Notes:
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Instructions on how to install brew can be found here
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The brew formula installs a prebuilt companion binary — nothing is compiled on install. It requires an arm64 Mac running macOS 15 or later, with a full installation of Xcode 26 or later selected. Installing just the Command Line Tools is not sufficient. Xcode can be installed from the App Store.
idb client
A cli tool and python client library is provided to interact with idb. It can run on any OS with a Python installation — it does not need to run on the Mac that hosts the companion.
It is installed alongside the companion by the brew formula above. It can also be installed separately via pip (releases publish to PyPI):
pip3 install fb-idb
Note: The idb client requires python 3.10 or greater to be installed.
Note: Instructions on how to install pip can be found here
Make sure both parts of idb are installed successfully and then you're good to go! Head over to the guided tour to try idb out.