Install GigaBrain

This tutorial gets gbrain on your PATH the fastest way: one shell command, no Rust toolchain. For variants — building from source, the airgapped vs online channel, npm — see Airgapped vs online afterwards.

Before you start

You’ll need:

• macOS (Apple Silicon or Intel) or Linux (x86_64 or ARM64).
• A shell where you can pipe to sh.
• Permission to write to ~/.local/bin (the default install directory).

Windows users: the install script does not yet support Windows. The cross-platform release binary works under WSL2; native Windows is on the roadmap.

Step 1 — Run the installer

One-line install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/macro88/gigabrain/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

The installer:

1. Detects your platform.
2. Downloads the matching airgapped binary from the latest GitHub Release.
3. Verifies the SHA-256 checksum.
4. Moves the binary to ~/.local/bin/gbrain.
5. Adds the directory to PATH in your shell profile (unless you pass --no-profile).

Step 2 — Confirm it’s on your PATH

Open a new shell or source your profile, then:

gbrain version
gbrain --help

You should see a version line beginning with gbrain v0.9.x. If gbrain: command not found, ensure ~/.local/bin is on your PATH (the installer prints a hint for your shell on success).

Step 3 — Pin a specific version (optional)

The installer always grabs the latest release. To pin:

Pinned install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/macro88/gigabrain/main/scripts/install.sh | GBRAIN_VERSION=v0.9.8 sh

What you got

By default, the installer fetches the airgapped binary. That means:

• The BGE-small embedding model is bundled inside the binary.
• The first time you run a semantic query, no download happens.
• The binary is ~180 MB.

If you’d rather have a smaller binary that downloads model weights on first use, see Airgapped vs online.

Where things live

Path	What
~/.local/bin/gbrain	The binary itself.
~/.gbrain/skills/	Embedded skills, extracted on first run.
~/.gbrain/models/	Cached model weights (online channel only).
~/brain.db (you choose)	Your actual knowledge brain. We’ll create this in the next tutorial.

Now build your first brain

Ten minutes from here to a working brain that answers your first question. If anything went sideways during install, the troubleshooting page covers the common failure modes.

Build your first brain Troubleshooting