Installing

Installing

bothy installs into your home directory and never asks for root. The binary goes to ~/.local/bin, configs to the two XDG directories, tools it fetches to its own tree. Nothing is layered onto the host, nothing is written system-wide, and there is no step that needs a reboot (ADR-002).

That is the whole reason it works unchanged on Silverblue, Kinoite and Bazzite, and inside Toolbx and Distrobox.

The short version

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bspeelm/bothy/main/bootstrap/install.sh | sh

Then bothy in any directory. First run lists what is missing, asks before downloading, and opens the window.

If the command is not found afterwards, ~/.local/bin is not on your PATH; the script says so and prints the line to add.

Every channel

	for
script	anyone on Linux or macOS	curl -fsSL .../install.sh | sh
dnf	Fedora Workstation	sudo dnf copr enable bspeelman/bothy && sudo dnf install bothy
apt	Debian, Ubuntu, Mint	download the .deb, then sudo apt install ./bothy_*.deb
Homebrew	macOS, or Linux if you already use brew	brew install --cask bspeelm/bothy/bothy
Go	people who already have Go	go install github.com/bspeelm/bothy/cmd/bothy@latest
source	contributors	git clone then make install-binary

The script is the recommended one on Linux, and on an image-based host it is the only one with no cost: dnf there means rpm-ostree and a reboot for bothy itself, which is a lot to pay for a binary that runs perfectly well from ~/.local/bin. The .deb is a file rather than a repository, so apt upgrade will not bring you the next one — download it when you want it (ADR-013).

bothy upgrade works out which of these you used and prints the right command.

Checking what you got

Every release artifact is signed by the workflow that built it, in a public log, so a swapped download is detectable whether or not anyone checks.

installed with	checked by
dnf	dnf, against Copr's key — automatic
go install	Go, against sum.golang.org — automatic
script	a checksum, automatic; the signature on request
Homebrew	the sha256 in the cask, automatic; the signature on request
.deb	the signature on request
source	you compiled it yourself

curl -fsSL .../install.sh | sh -s -- --verify          # checksum and signature
gh attestation verify ./bothy_*.deb --repo bspeelm/bothy --bundle attestation.jsonl

Take attestation.jsonl from the release page. Neither needs a GitHub account, and neither passes quietly when it cannot check. More in Security.

macOS: Gatekeeper

Only relevant on a Mac. bothy is not signed with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS attaches com.apple.quarantine to anything a browser or Homebrew downloads, and refuses to run it:

"bothy" not opened. Apple could not verify "bothy" is free of malware.

The cask clears the flag for you, and you should know that it does. Homebrew removed --no-quarantine in 4.7, so there is no user-side opt-out; the cask runs xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine during install. That is a Gatekeeper check skipped on your behalf. curl never attaches the flag, so the script avoids the question entirely.

For a copy macOS is already refusing:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "$(which bothy)"

bothy doctor recognises the flag and prints that command with your path in it. The reasoning, including why this project will not pay Apple $99 a year, is ADR-037.