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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
  • x86_64-apple-darwin — macOS on Intel
  • aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu — Linux on ARM64
  • x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu — Linux on Intel or AMD
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.