Installation

The fastest path is the prebuilt-binary installer — no Rust toolchain, no protoc, no compile. Build from source with cargo only if your platform has no prebuilt, or you want a development checkout.

Prebuilt binary (recommended)

Downloads a prebuilt hallouminate for your platform and adds it to your PATH:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/paulnsorensen/hallouminate/releases/latest/download/hallouminate-installer.sh | sh

Verify it:

hallouminate --version

Prebuilt binaries are published for each release:

Re-run the one-liner any time to upgrade to the latest release. On Intel Mac, Windows, or an older glibc, build from source with cargo below.

From crates.io

Builds from source, so it works on any platform with a Rust toolchain — at the cost of compiling native dependencies (a few minutes).

Prerequisites

• A Rust toolchain (cargo) — see https://rustup.rs.
• protoc (the Protocol Buffers compiler) — the lancedb build needs it.
  • macOS: brew install protobuf
  • Debian/Ubuntu: apt install protobuf-compiler

cargo install hallouminate --locked

The binary installs to ~/.cargo/bin/hallouminate (make sure that’s on your PATH).

From source

Same prerequisites as crates.io. Clone and build:

git clone https://github.com/paulnsorensen/hallouminate.git
cd hallouminate
cargo build --release

The binary lands in target/release/hallouminate.

Register the MCP server

Point your agent at hallouminate serve — the stdio MCP server that exposes the wiki tools. With Claude Code:

claude mcp add hallouminate -- hallouminate serve

hallouminate serve auto-spawns the daemon if none is running, so there’s no separate process to manage.

Bootstrap a config

hallouminate config init       # scaffold the XDG baseline config
hallouminate config validate   # confirm it parses

See Configuration for what goes in the config and how the XDG baseline merges with a repo-layer .hallouminate/config.toml.

Claude Code skill pack

A Claude Code plugin ships in this repo under plugins/hallouminate. It installs hallouminate and bootstraps your first wiki interactively:

/plugin marketplace add paulnsorensen/hallouminate
/plugin install hallouminate@hallouminate
/hallouminate:install

/install installs the binary, registers the MCP server, then asks where and how your first wiki should live (Socratic style) before scaffolding, indexing, and committing it with git.