3. Installation: via npm

This is the simplest and most recommended way to install — no Rust toolchain required, and npm automatically downloads the precompiled binary that matches your system.

3.1 One-line install

npm install -g @omicverse/omicos

Once it finishes, verify the install:

omicos --help         # if it prints the usage text, the install succeeded

Note: omicos has no --version flag (omicos --version returns unexpected argument). To check the version, start the daemon first and then query it over HTTP: curl -sS http://127.0.0.1:5055/api/version (or read the version field from the /health response).

3.2 How it works (under the hood)

@omicverse/omicos is a wrapper package — it contains no binary itself. It declares six platform-specific subpackages through npm's optionalDependencies, and npm installs only the one that matches your os and cpu:

The bin/omicos.js file in the package is a thin shim that simply execs the installed native binary at runtime. So when you type omicos, you're actually running the Rust-compiled binary directly, with no Node runtime overhead.

3.3 Common questions

Q: I get command not found: omicos?

The npm global bin directory isn't on your PATH. Run npm bin -g to find it (e.g. /usr/local/bin or ~/.npm-global/bin) and add it to PATH:

export PATH="$(npm bin -g):$PATH"   # add this to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc

Q: I get a permissions error (EACCES)?

Don't use sudo npm install -g. Use a user-level global directory instead:

npm config set prefix ~/.npm-global
export PATH="$HOME/.npm-global/bin:$PATH"
npm install -g @omicverse/omicos

Q: The install succeeded but no platform subpackage was installed?

Make sure your npm version is recent enough (≥ 7, which handles optionalDependencies correctly) and that you didn't pass the --no-optional flag.

3.4 Upgrading

omicos ships with a built-in auto-updater: on startup it polls the cloud release manifest, and when it finds a new version it downloads it in the background, verifies it with a SHA-256 checksum, atomically swaps the binary, and the new version takes effect on the next launch. So in most cases you won't need to upgrade manually.

To upgrade to the latest version manually:

npm install -g @omicverse/omicos@latest

Next steps

With the binary installed, you still need to set up the Python analysis environment before you can actually run analyses — continue to Chapter 4: Configuring the Python analysis environment.