Quickstart

Get CommitMind capturing commits in your AI coding sessions in under 3 minutes.

1. Install + onboard

Paste this into your terminal — it downloads the latest release of the commitmind binary into ~/.local/bin/, then immediately hands off to commitmind onboard:

$ curl -fsSL https://commitmind.dev/install.sh | bash

commitmind onboard is a Bubble Tea wizard that walks you through every step of getting set up:

  1. PATH — appends ~/.local/bin to your shell rc files (zsh / bash / fish) when it's missing. Idempotent + opt-in per shell.

  2. Background indexer — installs the user-level launchd plist (macOS) / systemd user unit (Linux) so the daemon auto-starts at login. No sudo required; skipped silently if already installed.

  3. Menubar tray (macOS only) — generates the .app wrapper + LaunchAgent so the menubar icon appears immediately.

  4. Sign in — opens your browser to a device-code approval page. Approve and the token persists to your local token store.

  5. Connect this repo — asks "Solo or Team?", mints an agent token, installs git hooks, runs the commit backfill, and waits for the symbol index to populate. (Wiring CommitMind into your coding agent is a separate step — see below.)

    • Solo — just me, this repo. The daemon's local-git source ingests commits to cloud over HTTP — no GitHub App install required. Good for personal projects, evaluations, and single- developer workflows. Solo mode only sees commits you have locally; teammates' pushes don't appear until you git fetch. You can upgrade to team mode later from the dashboard (an "Install GitHub App" banner appears on the project page).
    • Team — install the GitHub App on your organization. Webhooks ingest commits with full GitHub metadata, and teammates' pushes are visible without git fetch.

Each step is idempotent and gated on actual need — re-running commitmind onboard after a partial flow detects done steps and skips through them.

Prefer a GUI? The companion VS Code extension is on the Marketplace — it talks to the same local CLI/daemon, so you can mix and match.

Headless installs (CI, scripts, no-TTY)

When stdin / stdout aren't TTYs, the installer prints a next-steps line and exits without running the wizard. To complete setup later:

commitmind onboard       # full wizard (run from a real terminal)
# — or, the original two-step flow —
commitmind login         # connect this machine
commitmind init          # connect this repo

commitmind init and commitmind onboard both auto-disable the TUI when --no-tui, CI=, NO_COLOR=, or --mcp-config-only is set — so existing pipelines keep working unchanged.

2. Capture a commit

git commit -am "feat: add something"

The post-commit hook invokes commitmind capture in the background. It posts the commit metadata plus a short observation to CommitMind. Commits show up in the dashboard timeline within a few seconds.

If the network is unreachable, writes buffer to disk under ~/.commitmind/buffer/ and drain the next time you run commitmind flush (or on the next successful capture).

3. Prime a Claude session

In Claude Code, install the CommitMind plugin once per machine — it wires the MCP servers, the deterministic hooks, and the routing skills:

/plugin marketplace add commitmind/claude-plugin
/plugin install commitmind@commitmind

(See Claude Code setup for the manual MCP route and troubleshooting.) With the plugin connected, try:

"What do you remember about this project?"

Claude calls prime_session under the hood and gets back recent commits, active decisions, and condensed session context — so your next prompt doesn't start cold.

Editor config paths

Claude Code gets its MCP wiring from the plugin (above). For the other agents — or to wire Claude Code by hand — these are the per-agent MCP config paths. commitmind init --mcp-config-only=<editor> writes them for you, or edit by hand:

Claude Code and Claude Desktop are independent products that read MCP config from different files, so they coexist cleanly.

Next steps