Installation

Prerequisites

• Docker (v27+)
• git

Platform-specific notes

Platform	Recommendation
Linux	Docker Engine.
macOS	Docker Desktop.
Windows	Docker Desktop with WSL2 backend. Run md from inside the WSL2 Linux distribution.

Docker Desktop alternatives haven't been tested. Please let us know if you run into issues.

Install

curl -fsSL https://caic.xyz/install.sh | bash

This installs both caic and md binaries to ~/.local/bin/.

Verify

md version
# md v0.13.0

# Quick smoke test
md run -- echo "md works"

Install from source

Dependencies

• Go (recent version)
• Docker

Build and install

go install github.com/caic-xyz/md/cmd/md@latest

Recommended: Also install git-maruel for the git squash and git rb helpers.

Upgrading

curl -fsSL https://caic.xyz/install.sh | bash

Existing containers continue to work after upgrading. The container image is rebuilt on the next md start if the base image has changed.

To force a rebuild with the latest base image:

md prune    # remove old specialized images
md start    # will pull latest base and rebuild

Uninstalling

# Purge all md containers first
for name in $(md list --json | jq -r '.[].name'); do
  md purge "$name"
done

# Remove md-specialized-* images
md prune

# Remove binaries
rm ~/.local/bin/md ~/.local/bin/caic

Next steps

• Commands: full command reference
• Configuration: caches, environment variables
• Harnesses: agent-specific setup (Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, etc.)
• Tailscale: remote access over your tailnet