Install

Linux, macOS, and Windows via WSL2. Intel and ARM are supported.

Support matrix

Native Windows is intentionally not advertised as supported: Cortex/Axon currently rely on POSIX shell execution and process-group semantics. WSL2 provides the supported Linux environment on Windows.

Linux and macOS recommended

The installer detects Linux vs macOS and Intel/AMD64 vs ARM64, installs without root to ~/.local/bin, and verifies the binary.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/atakang7/cortex/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

Choose another user-owned directory without editing the script:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/atakang7/cortex/main/scripts/install.sh | CORTEX_INSTALL_DIR="$HOME/bin" sh

Windows 10/11

Install WSL2 once from an Administrator PowerShell terminal:

wsl --install

Restart if Windows asks, open the installed Linux distribution, then use the same supported installer:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/atakang7/cortex/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

Run Cortex from the WSL terminal. Your Windows drives are available under /mnt/c, /mnt/d, and so on.

Manual release install

For users who do not want to pipe an installer into a shell:

OS=$(uname -s | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]')
ARCH=$(uname -m)
case "$ARCH" in x86_64|amd64) ARCH=amd64 ;; arm64|aarch64) ARCH=arm64 ;; *) echo "unsupported architecture: $ARCH"; exit 1 ;; esac
mkdir -p "$HOME/.local/bin"
curl -fL "https://github.com/atakang7/cortex/releases/latest/download/cortex-${OS}-${ARCH}.tar.gz" -o /tmp/cortex.tar.gz
tar -xzf /tmp/cortex.tar.gz -C "$HOME/.local/bin" cortex
chmod 755 "$HOME/.local/bin/cortex"
"$HOME/.local/bin/cortex" --version

Build from source

This works on supported POSIX systems when Go and Git are installed:

git clone https://github.com/atakang7/cortex.git
cd cortex
go build -o cortex ./cmd/cortex
./cortex --version

About go install

Do not use go install github.com/atakang7/cortex/cmd/cortex@latest for Cortex 2.x. The repository's historical module path does not carry the /v2 suffix required by Go's semantic import versioning, so @latest can resolve the old v1 line. The release installer above is the version-safe installation path.

PATH troubleshooting

If installation succeeds but your shell says cortex: command not found, add the user binary directory to PATH:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Put that line in ~/.zshrc (common on macOS) or ~/.bashrc/~/.profile (common on Linux/WSL) to keep it across terminals.

Verify

cortex --version