Installation

Bobbin is a Rust application distributed via Cargo. It runs entirely locally — no API keys, no cloud services, no data leaves your machine.

Requirements

• Rust toolchain (1.75+): Install via rustup
• Git: Required for temporal coupling analysis
• C compiler: Required by tree-sitter build (usually pre-installed on Linux/macOS)

Install from Source

cargo install bobbin

This builds an optimized release binary with LTO enabled and installs it to ~/.cargo/bin/bobbin.

Build from Repository

git clone https://github.com/scbrown/bobbin.git
cd bobbin
cargo build --release

The binary is at target/release/bobbin.

First-Run Behavior

On first use, bobbin automatically downloads the embedding model (all-MiniLM-L6-v2, ~23 MB) to a local cache directory. This is a one-time download — subsequent runs use the cached model.

The model cache location follows platform conventions:

• Linux: ~/.cache/bobbin/models/
• macOS: ~/Library/Caches/bobbin/models/

Verify Installation

bobbin --version

Shell Completions

Generate completions for your shell:

bobbin completions bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/bobbin
bobbin completions zsh > ~/.zfunc/_bobbin
bobbin completions fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/bobbin.fish

Next Steps

• Quick Start — initialize and search your first repository
• Agent Setup — connect bobbin to Claude Code, Cursor, or other AI tools