Installation

Three routes, in order of how much they assume: a release binary fetched by a version manager, a release binary you download by hand, or a build from source. All three produce the same executable, total-recall, at the archive root.

mise

mise use github:prompt-cult/total-recall

mise selects the archive for your OS and CPU by reading the triple out of the asset name, so the same line installs the right binary on macOS arm64, macOS x86_64, Linux x86_64 and Linux arm64. It also fetches the release’s SHA256SUMS and verifies the download against it.

The older mise use ubi:prompt-cult/total-recall spelling still resolves, but mise has deprecated the ubi backend in favour of the github: backend.

aqua

aqua resolves assets through a registry entry rather than by inspecting release names, so it needs a registry.yaml mapping this project’s assets. The asset layout below is what such an entry targets:

packages:
  - type: github_release
    repo_owner: prompt-cult
    repo_name: total-recall
    asset: 'total-recall_{{trimV .Version}}_{{.Arch}}-{{.OS}}.tar.gz'
    format: tar.gz
    replacements:
      amd64: x86_64
      arm64: aarch64
      darwin: apple-darwin
      linux: unknown-linux-gnu

aqua g -i prompt-cult/total-recall works once that entry is in a registry aqua is configured to read.

Plain download

Prebuilt archives ship on every tagged release. Asset names are total-recall_<version>_<target-triple>.tar.gz — for example total-recall_0.7.0_x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz — and each archive holds one executable, total-recall, at its root.

VERSION=0.7.0
curl -fsSLO "https://github.com/prompt-cult/total-recall/releases/download/v${VERSION}/total-recall_${VERSION}_x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz"
curl -fsSLO "https://github.com/prompt-cult/total-recall/releases/download/v${VERSION}/SHA256SUMS"
sha256sum --check --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS
tar -xzf "total-recall_${VERSION}_x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz"
install -m 0755 total-recall /usr/local/bin/

Substitute the triple for your platform: aarch64-apple-darwin, x86_64-apple-darwin, x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu, or aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.

Verifying a download

Every release carries a SHA256SUMS over all four archives, one line each, <64 hex digits> then two spaces then the bare asset filename. sha256sum --check SHA256SUMS verifies them all; --ignore-missing verifies only the archives you downloaded. mise reads the same file automatically. The archives are built reproducibly, so a given source tree always yields the same digest.

Build from source

Requires a stable Rust toolchain. The default build compiles both LLM vendors and needs an Inception API key for the LLM-backed tools:

cargo build --release
./target/release/total-recall --version

For a vendor-free build — no API key, no LLM calls, every log-mining tool working — see Configuration:

cargo build --release --no-default-features

API key

The key is only needed by the LLM-backed tools (prior_period_summary / prior-period-summary). Get one from https://platform.inceptionlabs.ai, then either:

copy .env.template to .env and fill it in — the build-from-source CLI path, since the CLI reads .env relative to its working directory; or
put the key in the MCP registration snippet’s environment block, which is what an MCP server actually reads: see MCP setup.

A .env file is only loaded by a default build, and only relative to the process’s working directory. A spawned MCP server’s working directory is chosen by the client, not by you, so the environment block is the reliable route for a server.

For --provider mistral, set MISTRAL_API_KEY instead.

Requirements

Rust toolchain (stable), for building from source
INCEPTION_API_KEY in the environment or .env, for the LLM-backed tools on a default build
Optional: MISTRAL_API_KEY, for --provider mistral
sqlite3 on PATH only for the store-vacuum runbook

Licensed MIT OR Apache-2.0.

Keyboard shortcuts

total-recall