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Installation

Build Shaktiman from source. The full path below takes ~1 minute on a warm cache and produces two binaries — shaktiman (CLI) and shaktimand (MCP daemon).

Platform support

Shaktiman is POSIX-only: macOS and Linux. The daemon relies on flock, Unix domain sockets, and os.TempDir() semantics that don't translate cleanly to Windows. On Windows, use WSL 2 and follow the Linux instructions inside the WSL shell. Pull requests that add native Windows support are welcome.

1. Prerequisites​

  • Go 1.25 or newer. Check with go version.
  • Git. For cloning the repository.
  • A C compiler (gcc / clang). Required for the sqlite build tag.
    • macOS: install the Xcode Command Line Tools with xcode-select --install. Without them, go build fails at cgo with a command not found: cc error.
    • Linux: install build-essential (Debian/Ubuntu) or gcc + make (RHEL family) or the equivalent for your distro.
  • ~500 MB free disk for a mid-size repo (< 100k files). Larger repos scale roughly linearly — see Scaling.
  • ~1 GB free RAM for the daemon on a mid-size repo; more if you enable the brute_force vector backend (it holds all vectors in memory).

Optional (only for specific features)​

  • Ollama — required if you want vector embeddings. After installing, run ollama pull nomic-embed-text to fetch the default model. Without Ollama, search falls back to keyword mode and still works.
  • jq — used by a few commands in the Troubleshooting pages to filter shaktimand.log. Install via brew install jq (macOS) or apt install jq / dnf install jq (Linux).

For a postgres-only deployment without CGo, see Backends.

2. Clone and build​

git clone https://github.com/midhunkrishna/shaktiman.git
cd shaktiman

go build -tags "sqlite_fts5 sqlite bruteforce hnsw" -o shaktiman ./cmd/shaktiman
go build -tags "sqlite_fts5 sqlite bruteforce hnsw" -o shaktimand ./cmd/shaktimand

This produces ./shaktiman and ./shaktimand in the repo root. Move them onto your PATH if you'd like to call them from anywhere.

3. Verify​

./shaktiman --help
./shaktimand

shaktiman --help prints the list of subcommands (init, index, reindex, status, search, context, symbols, deps, diff, enrichment-status, summary). shaktimand without arguments exits with a usage message — that's the intended behaviour.

Next​

You've got the binaries. Now index a project and run your first query:

→ Quickstart