Installation

Skylands is one binary, skylands, for Linux and macOS on amd64 and arm64. The same binary runs every role: a one-machine world with skylands devworld up, a citadel, and the daemon on each machine that hosts agents.

From a release

Download the archive for your machine from the releases page. Archives are named for the version, the system, and the architecture, such as skylands_0.1.0_linux_amd64.tar.gz or skylands_0.1.0_darwin_arm64.tar.gz. Unpack it and put skylands on your PATH:

tar xzf skylands_*_linux_amd64.tar.gz skylands
sudo install skylands /usr/local/bin/

macOS

A binary downloaded with a browser is quarantined. Clear that before you run it:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine skylands

A release binary has the web client built in, so a citadel from it serves the 3D world with no other files.

From source

You need Go 1.26 and Node 22 or newer. Node builds the web client, which the Go build embeds. In a clone of the repository:

make web && make install

make install puts skylands in your Go bin directory, and make build puts it in bin/ instead.

Caution

go install alone builds a binary without the web client. That’s fine for a machine that only runs a daemon, but a citadel from it serves a page saying the client is missing.

Check the install

skylands version

prints the version you installed, such as skylands v0.1.0.

Machines that run agents

Every machine that hosts agents needs:

• git, for the worktree each session runs in.
• Node 22 or newer, for Claude Code and Codex, whose adapters come from npm.
• goose, on the PATH, only to run goose.
• gh, only to open pull requests from a conversation.

To check a machine, run:

skylands preflight

It reports git, Node, and npx with the versions and paths it found, and starts each agent over ACP without asking a model anything. It says whether Claude Code and Codex are logged in, and which models each offers that login. It also checks gh, and asks the daemon on this machine which version it runs. Each problem comes with what to do about it. The command exits with status 1 when a check fails.

An agent that isn’t installed, such as goose without goose on the PATH, or Claude Code and Codex without Node, is skipped rather than failed, as long as another agent is installed.