Skip to main content

Installation

caesar is a pnpm monorepo. It is not yet published on npm: you use it from a checkout of the repository — either installed for you by the one-liner below, or checked out and driven by hand with --root.

One-liner install​

curl -fsSL https://caesar.koumalabs.org/install | sh

The script checks the prerequisites (git, Node ≥ 22, pnpm or corepack), clones the repository into ~/.local/share/caesar, builds the CLI, and writes a caesar launcher into ~/.local/bin — after which caesar <command> works from any project on your machine, no --root needed. Run it again at any time to update: same directories, git pull, rebuild.

Two environment variables override the locations: CAESAR_INSTALL_DIR (the checkout) and CAESAR_BIN_DIR (the launcher). The script refuses to update over local modifications in the checkout rather than discard them.

Uninstall​

rm ~/.local/bin/caesar          # the launcher
rm -rf ~/.local/share/caesar    # the checkout

Those are the default locations — if you installed with CAESAR_INSTALL_DIR or CAESAR_BIN_DIR, remove those instead. Anything caesar wrote beyond that lives in the projects themselves: the files deposited by caesar init (the .caesar/ directory, the skill and the commands), and the MCP registration added by caesar mcp install <client> (remove it with claude mcp remove caesar, codex mcp remove caesar, or by editing the client's configuration file).

Prerequisites​

  • Node ≥ 22 (developed on Node 24).
  • pnpm.
  • At least one supported agent CLI on the PATH (Codex, Antigravity, OpenCode, Copilot, or Claude Code) — caesar delegates to it, it does not bundle it.
  • Bun, only if you plan to use the configuration TUI (caesar config) or build the standalone binary — the rest of the CLI runs on Node alone.

Checkout and build​

pnpm install
pnpm exec tsc -b        # builds all packages

Initialize a project​

pnpm run caesar init   --root <path-to-your-project>   # creates <project>/.caesar/config.toml + the system prompts + deposits the skill and commands for detected runtimes
pnpm run caesar doctor --root <path-to-your-project>   # which agents are installed, with which capabilities, allowed or not

pnpm run caesar <command> is the caesar script in this repository's own root package.json: it runs from here, never from the target project — hence --root <path-to-your-project> to tell it where to act.

Not published on npm

There is no npm install -g caesar today. Every command above runs from a checkout of the repository via pnpm run caesar <command> --root <path>. Once the caesar binary declared in packages/cli/package.json is published, or linked into your own projects by the usual pnpm means, caesar <command> works directly on the PATH — no more --root, resolveRoot then walks up automatically to the first .caesar/ or .git/ found from the current directory.

caesar doctor inspects the catalog of agents and cross-checks it against the effective policy. Real example, on a machine where all five agents are installed:

$ caesar doctor
▞▚ caesar · doctor ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

╭─────────────┬─────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────┬───────────╮
│ agent       │ version                 │ capabilities             │ policy    │
├─────────────┼─────────────────────────┼──────────────────────────┼───────────┤
│ codex       │ codex-cli 0.147.0       │ net(w) ro schema msg re… │ allowed   │
│ antigravity │ 1.1.12                  │ net ro schema resume di… │ allowed   │
│ opencode    │ 1.18.16                 │ net resume model mcp     │ allowed   │
│ copilot     │ GitHub Copilot CLI 1.0… │ net± ro resume dirs mod… │ denied    │
│ claude      │ 2.1.227 (Claude Code)   │ net ro resume dirs mode… │ denied    │
╰─────────────┴─────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────┴───────────╯

DENIED BY POLICY
Intended state, unless you decide otherwise.
  - "copilot": Agent "copilot" denied: present in the policy's "denied" list.
    Allow it with "caesar agents enable copilot --global".
  - "claude": Agent "claude" denied: allow_recursion is disabled (delegating to
    Claude from Claude Code would be recursion). Enable "allow_recursion"
    (Policy tab of the "caesar config" TUI, or edit .caesar/config.toml — no
    dedicated subcommand today).

allowed reads there in green and denied in red — colors classify, they never carry information on their own; --verbose adds the binary's path and the capabilities spelled out in full.

Every command accepts --root <dir> (explicit project root; by default, automatic search for .caesar/ or .git/ walking up from the current directory). Most also accept --json for machine output — two exceptions: caesar mcp serve does not know it at all, and caesar config refuses it explicitly since it is an interactive TUI with nothing machine-readable to produce.

Standalone binary​

caesar also builds into a single binary with no Node, no Bun, and no node_modules required on the target machine. See Standalone binary for how to build and run it.

Next steps​

  • Quickstart — your first delegate → diff → apply round-trip.