Installation

Fornax v0.0.1 is source-only — build from fornax-core with Cargo. There is no published crate or package manager release yet.

Build the workspace

git clone https://github.com/horonomy/fornax-core.git
cd fornax-core
cargo build --workspace --release

This produces four binaries under target/release/:

Binary	Crate	Purpose
fornax-daemon	fornax-daemon	The one local process: event intake, evidence store, verifiers, localhost API.
fornax	fornax-cli	fornax status / fornax detail — reads from the daemon's localhost API.
fornax-hook-claude	fornax-adapter-claude	Claude Code hook adapter.
fornax-hook-codex	fornax-adapter-codex	Codex rollout-tail adapter.

Put the binaries on your PATH

export PATH="$(pwd)/target/release:$PATH"

Add that line to your shell profile to make it persistent. Claude Code invokes fornax-hook-claude by name as a hook command, so it must be resolvable on PATH (or referenced by absolute path in your hook config — see Claude Code integration). Codex does not invoke fornax-hook-codex at all — it's a standalone process you run yourself (fornax-hook-codex &) that tails Codex's rollout transcript; see Codex integration for why, and how to start it.

Run the daemon

The daemon is a single long-lived process, started once per machine (not per project, not per session):

fornax-daemon &

For a persistent setup, run it under your OS's service manager (launchd on macOS, systemd --user on Linux) instead of a background shell job — Fornax does not ship a service unit yet, so this is a manual step. If the daemon isn't running, the CLI and adapters degrade gracefully (see Local runtime & daemon) rather than erroring.

Verify the install

fornax status

🛡 fornax: no findings yet

That message — not an error — means the binary, PATH, and daemon connection are all working; you just haven't produced a finding yet. Continue with the Quick Start.

Project-scoped vs. global setup

Fornax adapters can be wired into Claude Code's global settings (~/.claude/settings.json, applies to every project) or project-local settings (.claude/settings.local.json, applies to one repo only, never committed). Project-scoped is recommended while you're evaluating Fornax: a bug in the integration can't affect unrelated sessions, and it isn't imposed on other contributors who clone the repo. See Self-host / local development for the full project-scoped example fornax-core uses on itself.