Get started with AOS CE

Unicity AOS Community Edition is the public product distribution. Its command is aos; its product home is ~/.aos; its private bundled runtime lives at ~/.aos/runtime.

Install AOS

Stable is the installer default. Development and nightly are always explicit:

# Stable
curl -fsSL https://aos.unicity.ai/install.sh | sh

# Explicit prerelease channels
curl -fsSL https://aos.unicity.ai/install.sh | sh -s -- --channel dev
curl -fsSL https://aos.unicity.ai/install.sh | sh -s -- --channel nightly

An unavailable channel must stop without installing or falling back to another channel.

git clone https://github.com/unicity-aos/aos-ce.git
cd aos-ce
cargo check --locked --workspace
cargo test --locked -p unicity-aos-bootstrap

Do not use cargo install astrid as an AOS installation. That installs a standalone runtime CLI and does not provide the AOS product wrapper, embedded Community Edition manifest, product home, or coordinated update policy.

Product release layout

The signed release archive contains:

bin/aos
runtime/bin/astrid
runtime/bin/astrid-daemon
runtime/bin/astrid-build
runtime/bin/astrid-emit
Distro.toml
capsule-assets.txt
capsules/*.capsule

The installer selects a platform archive named unicity-aos-<target>.tar.gz, verifies the signed release identity and archive, and installs the product, pinned runtime, and Community Edition capsule set together.

Verification passes the archive itself to cosign verify-blob, binding the downloaded bytes to the AOS release workflow identity and immutable calendar version tag before extraction. The release publishes BLAKE3SUMS.txt as its primary digest inventory and SHA256SUMS.txt for compatibility with external tooling such as Homebrew.

The archive’s schema-2 release-manifest.json records the Astrid Runtime input as runtime.digest = "blake3:<64 lowercase hex>". The installer does not substitute a detached checksum comparison for direct Sigstore archive verification.

Start a host plugin

No manual post-install activation command is required for Claude Code, Codex, or Grok Build. Start a selected host after installation. Its plugin provisions only that host’s named principal and Oracle pack.

The release also publishes the Homebrew formula:

brew install unicity-aos/tap/aos

The tap repository and formula automation can exist before the formula itself. The command works only after the stable release publishes and verifies it.

The installer applies the Unicity CE manifest from the same signed product release. It does not fetch a mutable manifest from main. The wrapper keeps the product runtime home separate from standalone Astrid state.

Verify the installation

aos --version
aos status
aos doctor
aos capsule list

If the health service is enabled:

curl --fail http://127.0.0.1:8765/v1/runtime/health

A ready response proves the local product runtime is reachable. It does not prove that every provider credential, external service, or optional capsule is ready; use delegated runtime readiness and product diagnostics for those.

A clean product home

AOS creates ~/.aos and provisions Community Edition from scratch. It does not import, rename, rewrite, or delete a standalone ~/.astrid installation. The two homes can coexist, which makes a first AOS install safe to evaluate and remove without changing an existing Astrid setup.