Installation

One-liners

These one-liners will install cecli, along with python 3.12 if needed (cecli supports Python 3.10-3.14). They are based on the uv installers.

Linux & Mac

Use curl to download the script and execute it with sh:

curl -LsSf https://cecli.dev/install.sh | sh

If your system doesn’t have curl, you can use wget:

wget -qO- https://cecli.dev/install.sh | sh

Windows

powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://cecli.dev/install.ps1 | iex"

Install with uv

You can install cecli with uv:

uv tool install --native-tls --python python3.12 cecli-dev

This will install cecli in its own isolated environment. If needed, uv will automatically install a separate python 3.12 to use with cecli (cecli supports Python 3.10-3.14).

Also see the docs on other methods for installing uv itself.

Install with pipx

You can install cecli with pipx:

python -m pip install pipx  # If you need to install pipx
pipx install cecli-dev

You can use pipx to install cecli with python versions 3.10-3.14.

Also see the docs on other methods for installing pipx itself.

Other install methods

You can install cecli with the methods described below, but one of the above methods is usually safer.

Install with pip

If you install with pip, you should consider using a virtual environment to keep cecli’s dependencies separated.

You can use pip to install cecli with python versions 3.10-3.14.

pip install cecli-dev

uv pip install --native-tls cecli-dev

Basic Configuration

We highly recommend using an .cecli.conf.yml file in your project directories. A good place to get started is:

model: <model of your choice>
agent: true
auto-commits: true
auto-save: true
cache-prompts: true
check-update: true
enable-context-compaction: true
context-compaction-max-tokens: 0.8
show-model-warnings: true

agent-config:
  large_file_token_threshold: 8192
  skip_cli_confirmations: false

mcp-servers:
  mcpServers:
    context7:
      transport: http
      url: https://mcp.context7.com/mcp

Run Program

If you are in the directory with your .cecli.conf.yml file, then simply running cecli will start the agent with your configuration. For best results, since terminal emulators can be finicky, we highly suggest running:

cecli --terminal-setup

On first run to configure keybindings for the program (notably shift+enter). Support for terminals is ongoing so feel free to make a github issue or chat in the discord for us to figure out what’s needed to support automatically setting up a given terminal.

Next steps…

See the usage instructions to start coding with cecli.

cecli with docker