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smolbren ships as a pre-built binary. You do not need Rust, protoc, or a C/C++ toolchain to install it.

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Install with Homebrew

Homebrew is the recommended installation method on macOS and Linux:
This command selects the correct binary for your operating system and processor. The tap supports: Confirm the installation:

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Update with Homebrew

Fetch the latest formula and upgrade the installed binary:
To remove smolbren:
Uninstalling the binary does not delete your indexes or configuration under ~/.smolbren/.

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Download a release archive

Every GitHub release includes .tar.gz archives and SHA-256 checksum files for each supported platform:
  • aarch64-apple-darwin — macOS on Apple Silicon
  • aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu — Linux on ARM64
  • x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu — Linux on Intel or AMD
Intel macOS is not available as a pre-built binary because the ONNX Runtime used for local embeddings no longer publishes that target. Download the archive for your system, verify it against the matching .sha256 file, extract it, and move smolbren to a directory on your PATH.

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Build from source

Building from source remains available as an advanced fallback:
Source builds require Rust 1.85 or later and the Protocol Buffers compiler (protoc) on your PATH. Most users should use the pre-built Homebrew package.

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Verify the CLI

For a full list of commands and global flags:
The first semantic search downloads the local embedding model to ~/.smolbren/models/. Indexes, configuration, and model files all remain on your machine.
smolbren stores its configuration and index datasets under ~/.smolbren/ by default. You can override the config path per command with --config.