Install the CLI

hydrate is the command-line client for hydrate.sh. It authors your system graph from the terminal. The binary is hydrate, and hyd is a short alias.

Prebuilt binaries

Prebuilt binaries ship with each tagged release, so you do not need a Rust toolchain. Each release publishes archives for Linux (x86_64, aarch64), macOS (x86_64, aarch64), and Windows (x86_64), each with a .sha256 checksum.

Download the archive for your platform from the Releases page, verify it, and put hydrate on your PATH:

# Linux x86_64. Check Releases for the current tag; adjust the target for your platform.
tag=v0.1.17
target=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
curl -fsSLO "https://github.com/hydrate-sh/cli/releases/download/${tag}/hydrate-${tag}-${target}.tar.gz"
curl -fsSLO "https://github.com/hydrate-sh/cli/releases/download/${tag}/hydrate-${tag}-${target}.tar.gz.sha256"

# Integrity: did the download arrive intact?
sha256sum -c "hydrate-${tag}-${target}.tar.gz.sha256"

# Provenance: was it really built from this repo? Verify BEFORE you run it.
gh attestation verify "hydrate-${tag}-${target}.tar.gz" --repo hydrate-sh/cli

tar xzf "hydrate-${tag}-${target}.tar.gz"
./hydrate --version

The two checks do different jobs, and only the second is adversarial. The archive and its checksum come from the same host over the same channel, so anyone able to serve you a bad archive could serve a matching checksum — sha256sum catches a truncated or corrupted download, not a substituted one. The attestation is a signed statement that the artifact was built by this repository’s release workflow, which is why it belongs before tar.

gh attestation needs GitHub CLI 2.49 or newer. On Windows the asset is a .zip rather than a .tar.gz.

Authenticate

The CLI reads your API key from the environment:

export HYD_API_KEY=hyd_live_xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

See Authentication for where keys come from and how the CLI handles them.

Orient yourself

The CLI ships a built-in orientation. Run it any time:

hydrate guide

It prints the authoring loop, the core concepts, and a worked example. The quickstart below expands on it.