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kura

Installation

kura ships as a single self-contained binary per platform. Pick the route that fits your system.

Homebrew (macOS, Linux)

Section titled “Homebrew (macOS, Linux)”
brew install kechol/tap/kura

The formula depends on the Homebrew sqlite keg. This matters on macOS: Apple’s bundled SQLite cannot load the extensions kura’s search relies on, so kura uses the Homebrew build at /opt/homebrew/opt/sqlite. Homebrew installs it for you.

To upgrade later:

brew update && brew upgrade kura

Prebuilt binary

Section titled “Prebuilt binary”

Download the archive for your platform from Releases:

  • macOS: kura-darwin-arm64.tar.gz / kura-darwin-x64.tar.gz
  • Linux: kura-linux-x64.tar.gz / kura-linux-arm64.tar.gz
  • Windows: kura-windows-x64.zip

Each archive bundles an installer:

tar xzf kura-darwin-arm64.tar.gz
./install.sh   # copies kura to ~/.local/bin and clears the macOS quarantine flag

Verify downloads against SHA256SUMS.txt on the release page.

On macOS you still need Homebrew SQLite:

brew install sqlite

Optional: local LLM models

Section titled “Optional: local LLM models”

Semantic search, reranking, and kura clip formatting use a local LLM provider. Install Ollama (or LM Studio) and pull the default models:

ollama pull qwen3-embedding:0.6b          # embeddings (1024 dimensions)
ollama pull dengcao/Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B   # reranker
ollama pull qwen3:4b                      # generation (clip, tag suggestion, query expansion)

All three fit comfortably in memory on a 32 GB Mac. You can change the models with kura config — see Configuration.

Without a provider, kura degrades to keyword-only search; nothing here is strictly required to start.

Initialize

Section titled “Initialize”
kura init      # create ~/.kura, download the tokenizer, create the DB
kura doctor    # diagnose SQLite / extensions / LLM providers / DB integrity

kura init downloads the Japanese morphological tokenizer (sqlite-vaporetto with a bundled model, ~6.5 MB) from GitHub Releases with SHA256 verification. On platforms it doesn’t support (e.g. darwin-x64), it falls back to the trigram tokenizer automatically.

kura doctor is the health check to run any time something looks off; kura doctor --fix repairs the index, re-resolves links, and more.

The browser UI

Section titled “The browser UI”
kura browser        # http://127.0.0.1:7578 (binds to 127.0.0.1 only)

A document viewer (rendered Markdown, backlinks, two-hop links), an editor, three-mode search, a sidebar document tree that follows your document paths, a tag browser, and a d3-force knowledge graph — all served locally. Star a document and it stays pinned at the top of the sidebar, with whatever is filed under it expanding beneath it. The UI text is Japanese.

Where your data lives

Section titled “Where your data lives”

Everything is under ~/.kura/:

  • kura.db — the SQLite store (documents, search indexes, embeddings).
  • config.toml — configuration (kura config).
  • downloaded extensions and the tokenizer model.

Override the data directory with KURA_HOME, or point at a specific database file with KURA_DB. See Configuration.