Troubleshooting
“Windows protected your PC” / “Apple could not verify this app”
Expected — MyRA’s builds are unsigned on purpose. See Installing MyRA for the one-time step each OS asks for, and why.
“pdftotext is not installed”
MyRA reads PDFs — research full texts, a manuscript dropped on the peer review page — through poppler’s pdftotext, not a bundled library.
- The .deb declares this as a dependency, so
apt installpulls it in automatically. If you installed some other way, or see this on Linux anyway:sudo apt install poppler-utils. - The AppImage can’t declare package dependencies, so it falls back to whatever’s already on your
PATH— install poppler-utils yourself. - macOS:
brew install poppler. - Windows: grab a build from the poppler-windows releases and put it on
PATH. - Running from source needs this too — see CONTRIBUTING.md.
“No engine is installed” / a model won’t load
A model needs an engine to run it. Go to Settings → Runtime and install one — downloading a model on its own, from the Models page, doesn’t give you anything that answers. See Providers & models for how MyRA sizes a model once an engine’s in place.
If a specific model refuses to load, it’s most often a context size that doesn’t fit your hardware — MyRA tries to compute a safe one automatically, but a context you’ve pinned by hand is never overridden, including a stale one from before you changed GPUs.
Meeting recording has no audio, or asks for a window to share
Meetings need two permissions: microphone access, and a window/screen share for the system’s own output (used only for audio — MyRA discards the video immediately). If your OS denied either permission the first time, it won’t ask again automatically; check your system’s privacy settings for the app.
The local API won’t start
Settings → API refuses to serve without a key. Create one first (there’s a link right on the page), then Start serving. It listens on loopback only unless you explicitly turn on Also serve on the local network.
“Zotero is not reachable”
MyRA reads where your library lives from Zotero’s own prefs.js. This message means neither Zotero’s local API (port 23119) nor its database file answered at that location — check that Zotero has been opened at least once on this machine, and that its data directory hasn’t moved without Zotero itself having been reopened since.
A diagram refuses to draw something
MyRA’s diagram tool draws flowchart-shaped Mermaid — it names what it can’t draw (a sequence diagram, subgraphs) rather than drawing it badly, and the model normally retries with something it can. If it keeps failing, ask for what you want in plainer terms — boxes and arrows — rather than a specific Mermaid diagram type.
Still stuck
Open an issue on GitHub with your OS, MyRA’s version, and what you saw.