ncode CLI / Get started

Install

The ncode command installs into your home folder with one line. It needs no administrator password and touches nothing outside its own folders.

One-line install#

curl -fsSL https://code.llmotions.com/install.sh | sh

The installer:

1. checks that the Mac runs macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon (arm64), and stops with a message otherwise;
2. downloads the release for version 0.1.0 and checks its SHA-256 checksum against the one pinned in the installer; on a mismatch it stops and changes nothing;
3. puts the release in ~/.local/share/ncode and a small ncode command in ~/.local/bin;
4. prints what to run next.

It never touches your conversations, settings or keys: those live in the ncode data folder, ~/Library/Application Support/SwarmCode, which the desktop app shares.

To install somewhere else, set a prefix. The release then goes to <prefix>/share/ncode and the command to <prefix>/bin:

curl -fsSL https://code.llmotions.com/install.sh | NCODE_PREFIX="$HOME/tools" sh

Check that it works#

ncode --version

This prints ncode 0.1.0. ncode --help prints every option. Both are answered before anything else starts, so they work even while the desktop app is open.

Put ~/.local/bin on your PATH#

If your shell says command not found: ncode, the folder is not on your PATH yet. The installer tells you when that is the case; it never edits your shell files itself.

For zsh, the default shell on macOS:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

For bash:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

Update#

Run the same line again:

curl -fsSL https://code.llmotions.com/install.sh | sh

It replaces the release in place. Your conversations, settings and keys stay where they are, so nothing is lost. Quit any running ncode session first.

Uninstall#

curl -fsSL https://code.llmotions.com/install.sh | sh -s -- --uninstall

This removes the release, the ncode command and the swarmcode alias the installer wrote. By hand, the same is:

rm -f ~/.local/bin/ncode ~/.local/bin/swarmcode
rm -rf ~/.local/share/ncode ~/.local/share/swarmcode

(The last path is only there if you installed ncode under its earlier name.)

The old command name#

ncode was called by another name before this release, and its command was swarmcode. The installer also writes swarmcode as an alias: it runs ncode with the same arguments and, in a terminal, prints a one-line note that the name has changed. Scripts that call swarmcode keep working; move them to ncode when you can, because the alias will be removed in a later release. The older SWARM_… environment variables are still read too (see Environment variables).

Developer preview: why it opens without a warning#

ncode 0.1.0 is a developer preview. It is not notarized by Apple, because notarizing needs a paid Apple Developer ID, which ncode does not have yet.

macOS checks an unnotarized program when it carries a quarantine mark, which browsers and Mail add to everything they download. curl adds no such mark, so a release installed by the one-line installer starts without a Gatekeeper prompt. This holds only for downloads made with curl. A release downloaded with a browser is quarantined, and macOS refuses to run its programs until the mark is removed (see the manual install below).

Install the release by hand#

If you prefer not to pipe a script into sh, download the release yourself. The asset is on the GitHub releases of the ncode repository, named ncode-0.1.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz:

cd ~/Downloads
curl -fLO https://github.com/zaalipro/swarm-code-cli/releases/download/v0.1.0/ncode-0.1.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz
shasum -a 256 ncode-0.1.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz

Compare the printed checksum with the one on the releases page; stop if they differ. Then unpack it and put it where the installer would:

tar -xzf ncode-0.1.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz
mkdir -p ~/.local/share ~/.local/bin
rm -rf ~/.local/share/ncode
mv ncode-0.1.0 ~/.local/share/ncode
chmod 0600 ~/.local/share/ncode/releases/COOKIE
ln -sf ~/.local/share/ncode/bin/ncode ~/.local/bin/ncode

If you downloaded the archive with a browser instead of curl, clear the quarantine mark before the first run, or macOS blocks the programs inside:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/.local/share/ncode

Build from source#

For contributors. You need mise, which installs the pinned Erlang, Elixir and Rust versions, plus a C11 compiler, python3 and, on macOS, the Xcode command line tools (clang and codesign).

git clone https://github.com/zaalipro/swarm-code-cli.git
cd swarm-code-cli
mise install
mise exec -- mix setup
scripts/install.sh

scripts/install.sh builds the release (including the native terminal helper) and installs it exactly like the one-line installer, into ~/.local/share/ncode and ~/.local/bin; NCODE_PREFIX changes the prefix. Re-run it after pulling changes.