Install Asterism

Two ways in. They drive the same daemon and read the same ~/.asterism, so take one or both.

Asterism for Mac

Your instances in the menu bar, with no terminal open. Ships with the first tagged release.

The ast command line

One line on macOS or Linux, and it works today. Install the CLI

Install the CLI

$ curl -fsSL https://asterism.run/install.sh | sh

The script prints every privileged command and waits for a y before it runs one. Set ASTERISM_YES=1 when nobody is there to answer.

Or a package manager

Homebrew, on macOS or Linux

$ brew install --HEAD medicalissue/asterism/asterism

npm, once the first release ships prebuilt binaries

$ npx asterism-cli

Platforms

macOSThe script installs through Homebrew. Guests boot on Hypervisor.framework, the best-tested path.
LinuxNo package yet: the script clones the repository and builds ast and astd into ~/.local/bin, so git and Rust need to be there first. Set ASTERISM_PREFIX to land them somewhere else. Guests boot on KVM, which gets less testing than the macOS path.
WindowsWaiting on the QEMU and WHPX backend. Nothing to install here today.

Hand this to your agent.

Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, or whatever else holds a shell on the machine you want Asterism on. It installs the CLI and checks that it works.

Install the Asterism CLI on this machine and verify it, then report back.
1. Run `curl -fsSL https://asterism.run/install.sh | sh`. On macOS it
   installs through Homebrew; on Linux it builds from source. The script
   prints every privileged command and waits for a y, so set
   ASTERISM_YES=1 if you cannot answer prompts. If it stops because
   something is missing, tell me what it named; do not install anything
   else on your own.
2. Verify: `ast --version`, then `ast images`, which lists the image
   catalog without starting a daemon or touching the network.
3. Report the installed version and the catalog. Do not pull an image
   or boot an instance unless I ask for that separately.
State lives in ~/.asterism. `ast --help` lists every command.

An agent reading this site by URL wants llms.txt: the same commands with no markup.