Installation

Yokai releases contain two compiled binaries: yokai for the controller, daemon, agent, and CLI; and yokai-tui for the OpenTUI interface. The installer keeps them together so the default yokai command can launch the interface without a local Bun or Node installation.

Install script

The recommended installer supports macOS and Linux on amd64 and arm64:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spencerbull/Yokai/main/install.sh | sh

The script:

1. detects the current OS and architecture;
2. resolves the latest GitHub release;
3. downloads the matching Yokai_<version>_<os>_<arch>.tar.gz archive;
4. installs both yokai and yokai-tui beside each other;
5. uses /usr/local/bin when writable, or falls back to ~/.local/bin;
6. restarts an existing Yokai daemon when it is safe to do so;
7. verifies the installed version.

If ~/.local/bin is used, restart your shell or add it to PATH:

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

Download a release manually

Download the archive for your platform from GitHub Releases, extract it, and place both binaries in the same directory on your PATH.

Platform	Architectures	Archive
Linux	amd64, arm64	.tar.gz
macOS	amd64, arm64	.tar.gz
Windows	amd64, arm64	.zip

Windows builds are published, but the shell installer targets macOS and Linux.

Build from source

Building the controller requires the Go version declared in go.mod. Building the terminal sidecar requires Bun.

git clone https://github.com/spencerbull/Yokai.git
cd Yokai
make build

For TUI development:

cd ui/tui
bun install
bun run dev

Verify

yokai version
yokai --help

Running yokai without a subcommand checks the local daemon, starts it when needed, and launches yokai-tui.

Target-device requirements

A managed inference device should provide:

• Linux with SSH access from the operator machine;
• Docker running under the selected SSH user;
• a supported GPU driver and container runtime;
• enough disk space for images and model weights;
• outbound access to image registries and Hugging Face when downloads are required.

Yokai’s bootstrap checks prerequisites before it installs or upgrades the remote agent.

Next step

Continue to the Quick Start to connect a device and deploy a model.