Installation

Stella ships as a single Rust binary named stella. Today it installs with cargo from the source repository; prebuilt binaries, Homebrew, and a curl | sh installer are on the roadmap but are not shipped yet, and these docs will not pretend otherwise.

Requirements

• Rust 1.90 or newer with cargo on your PATH. Install via rustup if you don't have it: curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
• git (cargo uses it to fetch the repository).
• For the grep and glob tools, Stella shells out to ripgrep (rg) and fd — install both for full tool coverage.
• For CI monitoring and GitHub issue tools, the gh CLI authenticated via gh auth login. Optional; the tools simply don't register without it.

Install with cargo (recommended)

cargo install --locked --git https://github.com/oxageninc/stella-cli stella-cli

This fetches the repository, builds the stella-cli package with the committed Cargo.lock (that is what --locked pins), and places the stella binary in ~/.cargo/bin, which rustup already put on your PATH. No sudo, no shell-profile edits.

Verify the install:

stella --version
stella models      # lists every provider and whether a key is configured

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/oxageninc/stella-cli.git
cd stella-cli
cargo build --release
./target/release/stella --version

Or install your local checkout onto your PATH:

cargo install --locked --path stella-cli

The repository is a Cargo workspace of seven crates; stella-cli is the binary crate, and cargo build --workspace builds everything including the engine (stella-core), tools (stella-tools), provider adapters (stella-model), and the DuckDB store (stella-store).

Updating

Re-run the install command with --force to replace the installed binary with the latest commit:

cargo install --locked --force --git https://github.com/oxageninc/stella-cli stella-cli

Uninstalling

cargo uninstall stella-cli

Stella keeps its per-workspace state in a .stella/ directory inside each repository you use it in (telemetry database, memories) and long-lived credentials in ~/.config/stella/credentials.toml. Delete those directories and Stella is fully gone; it installs nothing else.

Next step

Set a provider key and run your first task: Quickstart.