Install aichat with Homebrew, MacPorts, Nix, pacman, scoop, winget

Project links

• Homepage
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• aichat

Project history

The GitHub repository was created in March 2023, and the first listed release, v0.1.0, was published the same day. Early positioning was simple CLI chat, but the current README describes a much broader terminal copilot with multi-provider model access.

By the current documentation, AIChat supports more than 20 LLM providers through a unified interface, including OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Ollama, Groq, Azure OpenAI, Vertex AI, Bedrock, GitHub Models, Mistral, Deepseek, OpenRouter, and OpenAI-compatible APIs. Later features include RAG, custom roles, function calling, MCP-style tools, agents, shell integration, completions, and a local server exposing chat, embeddings, rerank, playground, and arena endpoints.

Adoption history

Official installation instructions cover cargo install, Homebrew/Linuxbrew, pacman, Scoop, Termux, and prebuilt binaries for macOS, Linux, and Windows. The supplied package facts also list MacPorts, Nix, winget, and additional package-manager entries.

The repository's GitHub metadata shows five-figure stars by this run, and official releases continued through at least v0.30.0 in July 2025. Its adoption profile is broader than a single provider wrapper: it is used as a terminal frontend for many commercial, hosted, and local models.

How it is used

AIChat can be run with a plain prompt, as an interactive REPL, as a shell assistant with natural-language command execution, as a code-output filter, with files or URLs as inputs, with named roles or sessions, with RAG collections, with agents, or as a local API server.

Configuration lives in a per-user config directory as config.yaml, and secrets may be stored in the config directory's .env file or supplied with provider-specific environment variables such as OPENAI_API_KEY. The wiki documents AICHAT_CONFIG_DIR, AICHAT_ENV_FILE, AICHAT_CONFIG_FILE, and related overrides.

Why package nerds care

AIChat is significant because it packages much of the post-2023 LLM terminal workflow into one distributable binary: chat, shell command generation, file ingestion, provider abstraction, local serving, RAG, and agents.

For package maintainers, it is also a good example of modern CLI packaging pressure: rapid upstream releases, many optional provider integrations, cross-platform binaries, shell completions, and config paths that differ by OS.

Timeline

• 2023: GitHub repository created and v0.1.0 released.
• 2024: Releases expanded through v0.20+ while multi-provider and workflow features matured.
• 2025: v0.30.0 released in July.
• 2026: Official repository metadata and input package facts show broad cross-platform package-manager availability.

Related projects

• AIChat is related to provider-specific CLIs and SDKs for OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, Gemini, Ollama, Bedrock, Mistral, and other model services.
• The README points to sigoden/llm-functions for external tool/function-calling support.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/sigoden/aichat
• https://api.github.com/repos/sigoden/aichat/releases?per_page=100
• https://github.com/sigoden/aichat#readme
• https://github.com/sigoden/aichat/wiki/Command-Line-Guide
• https://github.com/sigoden/aichat/wiki/Configuration-Guide
• https://github.com/sigoden/aichat/wiki/Environment-Variables
• source_facts.package-manager