Installation

CommitBrief ships pre-built binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows on amd64 and arm64. Goreleaser uploads them to GitHub Releases on every stable tag and refreshes the Homebrew formula and Scoop manifest.

Homebrew (macOS and Linux)

brew install CommitBrief/tap/commitbrief

Upgrades follow brew update && brew upgrade commitbrief. The formula is auto-updated at CommitBrief/homebrew-tap on every stable tag.

Scoop (Windows)

scoop bucket add commitbrief https://github.com/CommitBrief/scoop-bucket
scoop install commitbrief

The manifest is auto-updated at CommitBrief/scoop-bucket.

Go install

go install github.com/CommitBrief/commitbrief/cmd/commitbrief@latest

go install writes the binary to $(go env GOPATH)/bin/commitbrief (typically ~/go/bin/commitbrief). If that directory is not on your PATH, the binary is not found by name — invoke it with an explicit path or add the directory to PATH:

export PATH="$(go env GOPATH)/bin:$PATH"

The Go-install path does not get ldflags-injected version / commit / date strings; --version reports the upstream tag from runtime/debug.BuildInfo but commit and built show as none / unknown. Brew and Scoop binaries embed all three.

GitHub Releases (raw binaries)

Pre-built archives for every published stable tag are at github.com/CommitBrief/commitbrief/releases. Download the archive that matches your platform (e.g. commitbrief_Darwin_arm64.tar.gz), extract it, and place the binary somewhere on your PATH. Each archive ships the commitbrief binary plus generated man pages under man/.

Verifying the install

commitbrief --version

A successful install reports something like:

commitbrief v1.0.0 (commit abc1234, built 2026-05-27T12:34:56Z)

In a TTY, the splash logo prints to stderr before any command runs. The logo is suppressed when stderr is redirected or piped (it would appear as raw ANSI escapes), so capturing output via commitbrief --json | jq stays clean.

Requirements

• Git must be available on PATH. CommitBrief shells out to git for the working-tree and index diff paths, and as a fallback for some commit-range operations.
• An LLM provider — see Providers. The mock provider is registered for tests; production reviews need Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama, or one of the CLI-tool-backed providers.

Uninstalling

Source	Command
Homebrew	brew uninstall commitbrief && brew untap CommitBrief/tap
Scoop	scoop uninstall commitbrief && scoop bucket rm commitbrief
Go install	rm $(go env GOPATH)/bin/commitbrief
Raw binary	delete the file

Removing the binary leaves your ~/.commitbrief/ config and any repo-local .commitbrief/ directories in place. Delete them manually for a fully clean uninstall.

Next

Once commitbrief --version works, head to Run your first review.