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Install & setup

Prerequisites

  • git on your PATH — the CLI shells out to git to snapshot and push your code. git ≥ 2.38 is recommended (the control node needs it for clean experiment merges).
  • Python 3.11+ — for the CLI itself. The installer bootstraps uv to manage it.
  • Your project's own toolchain (PyTorch, CUDA, uv/pip, …) on whatever machine runs the experiments. The CLI is dependency-light and stays out of the way.

Install

curl -fsSL https://autolab.ai/install.sh | sh

The installer bootstraps uv (a single static binary — no system Python needed) and installs the slim autolab CLI as an isolated uv tool. Verify:

autolab --version
autolab --help

autolab: command not found?

The CLI installs to uv's tool bin. If your shell can't find it yet, add it to your PATH:

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Install with uv directly

The installer just runs uv tool install autolab, so if you already have uv:

uv tool install autolab

Sign in

autolab login          # opens a browser, stores a token for this host
autolab whoami         # show the active host and signed-in user

Tokens are stored per host in ~/.config/autolab/credentials.json (owner-only, mode 0600), so a local-dev login and a production login can coexist. To sign in without a browser — on a remote or CI box — pass a token:

autolab login --token "$AUTOLAB_TOKEN"

See Tokens & API keys for minting and revoking tokens.

Choosing a control node

By default the CLI talks to https://app.autolab.ai. Override the host when you need to — for local development or a self-hosted control node:

autolab --url http://localhost:8080 status      # one-off
export AUTOLAB_URL=http://localhost:8080         # whole shell

Or define named profiles in ~/.config/autolab/config.toml:

default_profile = "prod"

[profiles.prod]
url = "https://app.autolab.ai"

[profiles.local]
url = "http://localhost:8080"
autolab --profile local status

Resolution order is --urlAUTOLAB_URL → active profile → https://app.autolab.ai. Full details in Configuration & environment.

Update & uninstall

uv tool upgrade autolab      # update to the latest release
uv tool uninstall autolab    # remove the CLI

Next: the Quickstart, or Core concepts to understand the model before you dive in.