Installation

ctx is a single binary. The quickest way to get it is npm, which avoids needing a Rust toolchain. Prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows are attached to every GitHub release.

System requirements

• Prebuilt binary / npm: macOS (Intel or Apple Silicon), Linux (x86_64 or aarch64), or Windows (x86_64 or arm64). No runtime dependencies.
• Building from source: Rust 1.85 or newer plus a C toolchain (only needed when building from the repository).
• git: only ctx changed and ctx diff require a git repository. Everything else works on plain directories.

Via npm (recommended)

npm install -g ctxai-cli
ctx --version

The npm package ships platform-specific binaries for macOS (x64 + arm64), Linux (x64 + arm64), and Windows (x64 + arm64). This is the same package the MCP examples use with npx -y ctxai-cli mcp.

Via winget (Windows)

winget install halloffame12.CTX
ctx --version

Published in the winget-pkgs community repository. Scoop is also available: scoop bucket add ctx https://github.com/halloffame12/scoop-ctx then scoop install ctx.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/halloffame12/CTX.git
cd CTX && cargo build --release
./target/release/ctx --version

Requires Rust 1.85 or newer plus a C toolchain. (There is no crates.io release — build from the repository to get the current version.)

Prebuilt binaries

Download a binary from the GitHub releases page. Each release includes a checksums.txt so you can verify the download:

curl -LO https://github.com/halloffame12/CTX/releases/download/v0.1.6/ctx-linux-x86_64
shasum -a 256 ctx-linux-x86_64   # compare against checksums.txt
chmod +x ctx-linux-x86_64
sudo mv ctx-linux-x86_64 /usr/local/bin/ctx

Upgrading

npm users: npm install -g ctxai-cli@latest. From source: git pull && cargo build --release. Check your version with ctx version.

Quick smoke test

cd /path/to/your/project
ctx init
ctx doctor

ctx doctor verifies the index and reports anything out of date.