Installation

Prebuilt binaries

Every release carries archives for Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD on amd64 and arm64, plus deb, rpm, and apk packages for Linux. Download, unpack, put arctic on your PATH, done. The released binary is the pure-Go build, so there is nothing to install alongside it.

With Go

go install github.com/tamnd/arctic-cli/cmd/arctic@latest

That puts arctic in $(go env GOPATH)/bin, which is ~/go/bin unless you moved it. Make sure that directory is on your PATH.

Homebrew

brew install --cask tamnd/tap/arctic

Scoop

scoop install arctic

Container image

The multi-arch image is on GHCR:

docker run --rm ghcr.io/tamnd/arctic catalog

Mount a volume if you want the downloaded dumps and the index to survive the container, since arctic writes a fair amount of state under its data directory:

docker run --rm -v "$PWD/data:/data" -e ARCTIC_DATA_DIR=/data \
  ghcr.io/tamnd/arctic sub golang

From source

git clone https://github.com/tamnd/arctic-cli
cd arctic-cli
make build              # produces ./bin/arctic (pure Go)
./bin/arctic version

The default build is pure Go with CGO_ENABLED=0 and needs nothing linked against it. For the optional DuckDB conversion engine, build with the tag:

make build-duckdb       # cgo build with the DuckDB engine

That build adds the duckdb engine to --engine. The pure-Go binary rejects --engine duckdb with a usage error telling you to build with -tags duckdb, so you always know which one you are running.

Requirements

• Go 1.26 or later to build the pure-Go binary. The released binary has no Go requirement.
• A cgo toolchain only if you build with -tags duckdb. The default build needs none.

Checking the install

arctic version

prints the version, commit, and build date. Then see the detected hardware, the work budget, and where arctic will keep its state:

arctic info

When that prints sensible paths and a budget, you are ready for the quick start.