Install Golem

Golem is a local-first proxy and MCP server that sits in front of your LLM traffic: redaction, routing, local tools, and honest observability. It runs on your machine, it is free, and it is open source. No account required.

Then

golem init      # wire this project up
golem --help    # everything else

What the installer does

It prefers npm and falls back to a standalone binary, so you end up with the lighter of the two your machine can support:

1. Node 22 or newer with npm present, so it runs npm install -g golem-run, which then updates itself like any other global package.
2. Otherwise it downloads a self-contained binary. On macOS and Linux that lands in ~/.local/bin (or /usr/local/bin) and the script tells you if that is not on your PATH; on Windows it lands in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Golem\bin and is added to your user PATH for you.

Supported: macOS and Linux on x64 and arm64, and Windows on x64 and arm64. Anything else stops with a message rather than installing something that will not run.

Read it before you run it

Piping a script into a shell means trusting whoever served it. Both scripts are short and worth thirty seconds: install.sh and install.ps1. Those links go to the exact files that run, served from the tagged release on GitHub over HTTPS.

Being straight about the limits: the download is authenticated by TLS and by GitHub's release, and nothing more. There is no checksum file and no code signature yet, so a compromised release would not be caught by the installer. If that matters to you, install with npm install -g golem-run instead, which verifies package integrity against the registry, or build from source.

Knobs