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Chime Docs

Install

Chime ships as a single chime binary: it’s the CLI, the per-machine daemon (chime daemon), the relay (chime relay), and the MCP server (chime mcp serve), all in one executable. Pick whichever install path fits your machine.

Install script

Section titled “Install script”
Terminal window
curl -fsSL chime.sh | sh

This is a sh-compatible script, also served at the stable canonical URL https://chime.sh/install.sh if you’d rather download and read it first (it’s plain, unminified shell — do that; it’s a normal thing to want before piping something into sh). It:

  1. Detects your OS and architecture (darwin/linux, amd64/arm64).
  2. Downloads the matching chime binary from the latest GitHub release.
  3. Verifies its sha256 checksum against the release’s checksums.txt before making it executable — a mismatch deletes the download and exits non-zero rather than installing something unverified. This protects against corruption, truncation, or a download that diverged from what the release channel/CDN is currently serving — it is not an integrity guarantee against a compromised release or a compromised maintainer account, since both the binary and checksums.txt come from the same channel. (The npm path below carries npm provenance attestations once published to the registry, which ties the package back to the GitHub Actions build — a stronger guarantee than a same-channel checksum.) Set CHIME_VERSION to pin an exact release tag (e.g. v0.6.1) instead of latest, or CHIME_RELEASE_BASE_URL to point at a different release mirror entirely.
  4. Installs to /usr/local/bin if that’s writable without sudo, else falls back to ~/.local/bin (override either with CHIME_INSTALL_DIR).

Run chime mcp install afterwards to register the MCP server with your agent harness — the install script doesn’t do this for you (see MCP).

npm

Section titled “npm”
Terminal window
npm i -g @chime-sh/cli

Published with npm provenance attestation from CI (rolling out with v0.7.0) — once live, npm audit signatures @chime-sh/cli (or GitHub’s package page) lets you verify the tarball was built from this repository’s source, not hand-uploaded from someone’s laptop. This is the path to reach for if you want that supply-chain guarantee, or if curl | sh isn’t allowed in your environment.

GitHub releases

Section titled “GitHub releases”

Prebuilt, statically linked (CGO_ENABLED=0) binaries for every release, alongside a checksums.txt (sha256, one line per asset):

OS Architecture Asset
macOS Apple Silicon (arm64) chime-darwin-arm64
macOS Intel (amd64) chime-darwin-amd64
Linux arm64 chime-linux-arm64
Linux amd64 chime-linux-amd64
Windows — not yet published — build from source below

Download the asset for your platform plus checksums.txt, verify, then mark it executable:

Terminal window
sha256sum -c --ignore-missing checksums.txt   # or: shasum -a 256 -c
chmod +x chime-<os>-<arch>
mv chime-<os>-<arch> ~/.local/bin/chime

macOS binaries are unsigned/unnotarized today; Gatekeeper will ask you to confirm the first run (xattr -d com.apple.quarantine <path> if you’d rather skip the prompt, only after you’ve verified the checksum).

Prebuilt binaries are built with CGO_ENABLED=0 for reproducible cross-compilation, which means the optional macOS menu-bar GUI (chime menubar, needs cgo + Cocoa) prints an “unsupported” notice on these binaries. The CLI, daemon, relay, and MCP server are unaffected — build from source (below) if you want the menu bar.

Build from source

Section titled “Build from source”

Needs Go (see go.mod for the minimum version). From a checkout of this repo:

Terminal window
git clone https://github.com/charlesverdad/chime
cd chime
just build            # -> dist/chime (+ dev-only chimed/chime-relay wrappers)
# or, without just:
go build -o dist/ ./cmd/chime

just build runs inside this repo’s nix-shell, which pins Go (and every other dev dependency) for you — see the repo’s shell.nix. If you have Go on PATH already, the plain go build above works without Nix.

Building from source (with cgo enabled, the Go default) also gets you the optional macOS menu bar:

Terminal window
chime menubar

It’s a small opt-in system-tray presence — daemon/relay status, Pair a device…, Open Activity log… — the daemon itself stays headless whether or not you ever run it. See CLI for the full command reference.

Next

Section titled “Next”
  • Quickstart — pair your phone and send your first message.
  • CLI — every chime command.
  • MCP — wire chime mcp serve into your agent harness.