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Turn off Zscaler on your Mac

Ben Kircher

If you belong to the cohort of people working for big corp and doing also software development you might have some unfortunate encounters with Zscaler.

Zscaler constantly breaks my development flow. Downloading packages from various sources with various package managers, uploading packages, pulling container images, interacting with container registries, going through network tunnels, your tailnet, …it breaks it all.

I'm not sure what Zscaler's purpose is (enforcing some unnecessary compliance maybe?) but I doubt that it makes anything more secure.

Intercepting and reading traffic doesn't sound like a good idea, no? Next to the obvious privacy concerns there are the

  • performance impact
  • the costs
  • depending on the availability of their service

I mean, why would you? ¯\(ツ)/¯

Regardless, this is how you can turn it off:

$ sudo launchctl list|grep -i zscaler
Password:
75508   -11     com.zscaler.tunnel
500     0       com.zscaler.service

$ sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.zscaler.service.plist \
 && sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.zscaler.tunnel.plist

$ sudo launchctl list|grep -i zscaler

…and it's gone. Now you can pull from nvm, dnf, containers from Quay, run docker build, etc.