Installation

This page installs the Myrmic CLI on Linux. The CLI is the only thing you install by hand:

• The Myrmic Runtime is managed by the CLI - myrmic runtimes start brings one up, there is nothing separate to install.
• The Myrmic SDK is a Rust dependency of your cell crate - myrmic new puts it into the generated Cargo.toml.

On x86_64 the release package is the shortest path. There is no arm64 package, so on arm64 you build from source.

Prerequisites

On a fresh Debian or Ubuntu image, run sudo apt update once before the first apt install on this page. The commands on this page use curl. Most images ship it already - check with curl -V. If yours does not: sudo apt install curl on Debian and Ubuntu, sudo dnf install curl on RHEL, AlmaLinux and Fedora.

To build cells

You need all of these whether you installed the CLI from a package or built it yourself.

• Rust, via rustup:

  curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

  The installer does not touch the shell it runs in, so make rustup available in the current one before you go on (a new shell picks it up by itself):

  source "$HOME/.cargo/env"

• The pinned nightly toolchain, the wasm32-unknown-unknown target and the rust-src component are all installed for you on the first build. A cell scaffolded by myrmic new, on its first myrmic build, ships a rust-toolchain.toml that prompts rustup to auto-install the right toolchain and its components.

  The pinned date is not a technical floor; it is the latest nightly tested for the current Myrmic release, and it moves forward with each release.

  To install these ahead of that first build - on an offline machine, or just to keep the build output quiet - the steps are optional:

  rustup toolchain install nightly-2026-08-07
  rustup target add wasm32-unknown-unknown --toolchain nightly-2026-08-07
  rustup component add rust-src --toolchain nightly-2026-08-07

• A C toolchain. A cell compiles to WebAssembly, but cargo still compiles and links every dependency's build script as a native binary for your machine. rustup ships no linker, so without one myrmic build stops before it starts the build, with no C linker found.

  Distribution family	Install
  Debian, Ubuntu	sudo apt install build-essential
  RHEL, AlmaLinux, Fedora	sudo dnf install gcc

Additionally, to build the CLI from source

Distribution family	Install
Debian, Ubuntu	sudo apt install cmake git
RHEL, AlmaLinux, Fedora	sudo dnf install cmake git

git clones the repository, and the build shells out to it for the source revision it stamps into the binary. cmake is used by a C dependency of the CLI binary.

Both package lists above are derived from Myrmic's dependency tree and from installs observed on a handful of images. They are not a minimal set - if your machine already has a working C compiler, cmake and git, however they got there, that works too.

Build resources

These are lab measurements on small cloud instances, not guaranteed minimums - they move with your CPU, disk and how busy the machine is.

• A cell build takes seconds. Once the C toolchain is present, myrmic build was 9 to 10 seconds on 2 to 4 vCPU, and up to around 30 seconds on a busier host. The first build in a fresh crate also compiles the cell's dependencies, so it is the slow one; later builds are quicker.
• Building the CLI from source is the heavy step, and wants a few GB of both RAM and disk. On 8 vCPU running alone it took about three and a half minutes, roughly 2 GB peak resident memory and 2.6 GB left in target/. On a contended host it takes proportionally longer - around 9 to 10 minutes when three builds shared a 16-thread machine.

Install from a release package (x86_64)

Packages are published on the releases page under the tag myrmic/v<version>. Each release carries:

Asset	What it is
myrmic-cli_<version>_amd64.deb	the CLI
myrmic-cli-dbgsym_<version>_amd64.deb	its debug symbols
two .rpm files	the same CLI and its debug symbols, converted from the .deb; the converter picks their names, so read them off SHA256SUMS
myrmic-cli_<version>_sbom.spdx.json, myrmic-cli_<version>_sbom.cdx.json	the dependency inventory of the build
SHA256SUMS	checksums for every asset above

The package name is myrmic-cli and the binary it installs is /usr/bin/myrmic. It also puts NOTICE and the licence texts under /usr/share/doc/myrmic-cli/, where the packaging tool adds a copyright file of its own. There is no systemd unit, no man page and no shell completion - dpkg -L myrmic-cli lists the full payload.

Download

The assets hang off the release tag, so the tag is part of the URL. Start with SHA256SUMS: it lists every asset of the release by name, which is also how you learn what the RPMs are called - the converter picks those names, nothing in the pipeline records them. Replace <version> with the release you want:

version='<version>'
base=https://github.com/peeriot/myrmic/releases/download/myrmic/v$version

curl -fLO "$base/SHA256SUMS"
cat SHA256SUMS

-f matters: without it curl saves GitHub's 404 page under the asset's name and still exits 0, so a typo in $version gets you a SHA256SUMS that reads Not Found. With it, curl prints the error and exits non-zero.

Then fetch the package you want from the same place:

Debian, Ubuntu:

curl -fLO "$base/myrmic-cli_${version}_amd64.deb"

RHEL, AlmaLinux, Fedora:

curl -fLO "$base/<the .rpm name SHA256SUMS listed>"

Verify the download

With the package and SHA256SUMS in the same directory:

sha256sum --ignore-missing -c SHA256SUMS

SHA256SUMS lists every asset of the release. Without --ignore-missing, sha256sum prints FAILED open or read for each asset you did not download, and exits non-zero.

Install

Debian, Ubuntu:

sudo apt install "./myrmic-cli_${version}_amd64.deb"

RHEL, AlmaLinux, Fedora:

sudo dnf install "./<the .rpm name SHA256SUMS listed>"

The .deb line reuses the $version you set in the Download block. For the RPM, pass the name you read off SHA256SUMS. If you would rather not type it out, a glob covers the release suffix the converter picked:

sudo dnf install "./myrmic-cli-${version}"-*.x86_64.rpm

Distributions

The .deb carries a libc6 dependency that dpkg-shlibdeps derives at build time, from the glibc the release binary happened to be built against - as of Myrmic 0.5.0, libc6 (>= 2.34). Nothing in this repository pins that floor, so treat the number as the current value rather than a promise, and read the real one off the package you downloaded:

dpkg-deb -f "myrmic-cli_${version}_amd64.deb" Depends

Installing the package has been observed to work on Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, Debian 12, and AlmaLinux 9 and 10. Other distributions with glibc 2.34 or newer should work as well, but have not been checked.

Below the floor, apt refuses the .deb rather than letting it fail later: the install stops with a libc6 dependency error naming the version your system has. Ubuntu 20.04, on glibc 2.31, was observed to do exactly that.

Whether the RPM carries the same guard is not checked anywhere in this repository. It is converted from the .deb at release time, and nothing in the pipeline reads back which dependencies survived the conversion - so below the floor it may install cleanly and then die on a missing symbol version the first time you run myrmic. rpm -qp --requires <file>.rpm shows what it really asks for. Below the floor, on either family, build from source instead.

arm64

No aarch64 package is published - the release pipeline builds x86_64 only. On arm64, build from source.

Install from source

Install the C toolchain and the two extra packages from Prerequisites first, then:

git clone https://github.com/peeriot/myrmic.git
cd myrmic
cargo build --release --bin myrmic

The binary is at target/release/myrmic. Put it on your PATH, or install it directly:

cargo install --path swarm/myrmic-cli/

To export logs, traces and metrics to tools such as Grafana or Jaeger over OTLP, add --features open-telemetry to either command. See the Observability tutorial.

With BLE support

To run cells that talk to Bluetooth Low Energy peripherals, the CLI has to be built with its ble feature. The release packages are built without it, so BLE support on Linux requires building from source. It links against the system D-Bus library to reach the BlueZ stack, so install its development headers first:

Distribution family	Install
Debian, Ubuntu	sudo apt install libdbus-1-dev
RHEL, AlmaLinux, Fedora	sudo dnf install dbus-devel

Then install the CLI with the feature:

cargo install --path swarm/myrmic-cli/ --features ble

Without the feature, BLE support is compiled out of the runtime, so it does not advertise ble and cannot serve BLE cells. See Work with BLE peripherals for how a cell uses BLE.

Verify the installation

myrmic --version

What Myrmic writes to your machine

Location	Contents
~/.local/share/myrmic/	runtime identities in runtimes/<name>.yaml, and one directory per runtime holding its database (<id>/db) and its rotating logs (<id>/logs/runtime.<date>.log, rotated daily, 7 kept)
$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/myrmic/	the PID file of each running runtime

Those are the persistent locations at their defaults. A runtime can be given a database directory and a log directory of its own, and myrmic runtimes start --tmp keeps the database in memory instead. $XDG_DATA_HOME overrides the data directory when it is set. When $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR is not set - which is common for a process started by systemd - PID files go to $TMPDIR/myrmic-<user>/, which is /tmp/myrmic-<user>/ unless $TMPDIR says otherwise. <user> is $USER, or $LOGNAME if that is unset - and if neither is set, the directory is just myrmic.

Builds and deploys also unpack scratch directories under $TMPDIR (myrmic-nest-<uuid>/, myrmic-spawn-<uuid>/), and a runtime using the signal layer opens a socket at /run/peeriot/signal-layer.sock or $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/peeriot-signal-layer.sock.

Uninstall

If a runtime is running, stop it first - with nothing running the command exits with an error, which is harmless here:

myrmic runtimes stop

Remove the CLI:

sudo apt remove myrmic-cli    # Debian, Ubuntu
sudo dnf remove myrmic-cli    # RHEL, AlmaLinux, Fedora

If you installed it with cargo install:

cargo uninstall myrmic-cli

Neither removes what Myrmic wrote to your machine. To remove that as well:

[ -n "${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME}" ] && rm -rf "${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/myrmic"
[ -n "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR" ] && rm -rf "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/myrmic"
rm -rf "${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/myrmic-${USER:-$LOGNAME}" "${TMPDIR:-/tmp}/myrmic"

The first line deletes the runtime database - everything your cells stored is in there. The last two cover both PID locations. The guards on the first two lines matter, because an unguarded version of either deletes a root-anchored path when its variables are unset: rm -rf "$XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/myrmic" reads as /myrmic, and rm -rf "${XDG_DATA_HOME:-$HOME/.local/share}/myrmic" reads as /.local/share/myrmic when neither $XDG_DATA_HOME nor $HOME is set.

Next

Quickstart - build, deploy and call your first cell.