Install Tome

Tome ships as a single self-contained executable. The semantic index, vector search, and reranker runtime are compiled in. The search models are downloaded the first time they're needed (or explicitly with tome models download) and kept under ~/.tome/. The default medium profile fetches a ~110 MB embedder (bge-base-en-v1.5) and a ~563 MB reranker (bge-reranker-large); set [models] profile in ~/.tome/config.toml to select small, medium, or large. No daemon, no account. Tome sends anonymous, opt-out usage telemetry (auto-disabled under CI); turn it off with tome telemetry off. See tome telemetry.

Prerequisites

• Binary install (Homebrew / prebuilt): none. The binary is statically built for Linux and macOS.
• cargo install: Rust 1.93 or newer, a C/C++ toolchain (for the bundled SQLite and sqlite-vec C extension), CMake, and a network connection (the ONNX Runtime used for inference is downloaded during the build).

Homebrew (macOS)

brew install aaronbassett/tap/tome

Cargo

cargo install tome-mcp

The crate is published as tome-mcp; it installs a binary named tome.

From source

git clone https://github.com/devrelaicom/tome
cd tome
cargo build --release
# the binary is at target/release/tome

Platform support

Platform	x86_64	aarch64
Linux	supported	supported
macOS	—	supported
Windows	untested	untested

Prebuilt binaries are provided for Linux (x86_64 and aarch64) and macOS (aarch64 / Apple Silicon only). Intel macOS has no prebuilt binary — install with cargo install tome-mcp or build from source. Windows is not currently tested.

Verify the install

tome --version

If that prints a version, the installation succeeded — continue to the Quickstart.

Shell completions

tome completions <shell> prints a completion script to stdout. Generating it is a pure static operation over the command tree, so it reads no HOME, index, or config — you can run it during shell setup before Tome is otherwise configured. Supported shells are bash, zsh, fish, powershell, and elvish; an unknown shell is a usage error (exit 2) that lists the valid values.

Redirect the output to the file your shell loads completions from. For zsh:

tome completions zsh > ~/.zfunc/_tome
# ensure ~/.zfunc is on your fpath and compinit runs, e.g. in ~/.zshrc:
#   fpath=(~/.zfunc $fpath)
#   autoload -U compinit && compinit

For bash, source it directly or write it to a bash_completion.d file:

source <(tome completions bash)
# or: tome completions bash > /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d/tome

See tome completions for the fish, powershell, and elvish recipes.