Install

Ratel ships as two SDKs over one Rust core, plus Ratel Local for MCP clients such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. No hosted Ratel service or API key is required.

SDK

npm install @ratel-ai/sdk@0.4.0

pip install "ratel-ai==0.4.0"
# extras:
pip install 'ratel-ai[mcp]'   # register upstream MCP servers
pip install 'ratel-ai[otlp]'  # OTLP telemetry export

The docs pin the version they document; drop the pin to track the latest release.

Requirements

• Prebuilt native targets: macOS (darwin-arm64, darwin-x64), Linux glibc (linux-x64-gnu, linux-arm64-gnu), Windows (win32-x64-msvc).
• On those targets nothing compiles at install time — no Rust toolchain.
• Semantic & hybrid search is opt-in and downloads a local embedding model on first use; BM25 needs nothing.

Ratel Local

For MCP clients, install the gateway instead of an SDK:

npm install --global @ratel-ai/mcp-server@0.4.0   # binary: ratel-mcp, Node.js 20+
# or, as a Claude Code plugin:
claude plugin marketplace add ratel-ai/ratel-local
claude plugin install ratel-mcp@ratel

Claude Code and Codex wiring is covered in the Ratel Local quickstart, including import and plugin paths. Cursor uses manual mcp.json setup.

The Rust crate ratel-ai-core underlies both SDKs; it is a reference, not an install target.

Next steps