Lantern

Lantern is a lightweight, menu-bar-only GUI wrapper for Cloudflare's warp-cli on macOS.

It was built out of frustration with Cloudflare's enshittified, bloated and intrusive macOS client update, which replaced the original, clean menu-bar toggle with an unwanted standalone window app. Lantern brings back the minimal, native-feeling menu-bar experience with simple, single-click controls.

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Why Lantern?

• No Bloat: It sits exclusively in your menu bar. No windows whatsoever.
• Old-School Simplicity: Restores the classic WARP menu-bar behavior, which is click to open a clean dropdown to toggle connection, and get out of the way.
• Lightweight: Built natively in SwiftUI to keep resource usage minimal.

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Features

• Menu-Bar Only Interface: Completely headless-style control over your WARP connection.
• Flexible Modes: Support for 1.1.1.1 with or without WARP tunnel enabled.
• Trusted Wi-Fi Networks: Option to disconnect or bypasses the tunnel when connected to specified Wi-Fi networks.
• Routing Controls: Split Tunneling and Local Domain Fallback configuration support.
• Proxy Mode Support: WARP's built-in local proxy mode.
• Launch at Login: Native support for launch at login (duh)

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Prerequisites

Lantern requires warp-cli to be present on your system to perform connection commands.

You can satisfy this requirement in two ways:

1. Official Cloudflare WARP App: Keep the official app installed. Lantern will talk directly to its underlying warp-cli binary. (The official app DOES NOT NEED TO BE RUNNING (yay)).
2. Standalone warp-cli: Modified from the original app, with the GUI removed. The tutorial for extracting the cli yourself from the official app is here.

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Installation

1. Download the latest .dmg release from the Releases section.
2. Open the .dmg and drag Lantern.app into your /Applications folder.
3. First Launch (macOS Gatekeeper): Because this app isn't signed with a $99/year Apple Developer certificate, macOS will block it on first run. To open:
   • Go to System Settings > Privacy & Security.
   • Scroll down to the security section and click Open Anyway next to the Lantern block notice.

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Updates

If you have any feature ideas, please do let me know, and we can work on that swift-ly (pun definitely intended). Plus, if you find any bugs, or memory leaks (I hope not), mention them in the issues panel, and I would love to take a look. Peace!