Install

Verify the Go toolchain is available:

go version

If go is not found, tell the user:

steop's companion binary is built from Go source and requires the Go toolchain (1.22 or newer). Install it from https://go.dev/dl/ then re-run /steop:install.

Stop here if Go is missing. Git is not required — go install fetches the source via the Go module proxy.

Step 3: Ensure Install Directory Exists

The binary installs to ~/.local/bin. Create it if missing:

mkdir -p "$HOME/.local/bin"

Step 4: Install

Tell the user:

Installing steop via go install from the main branch. The first run downloads the module to your Go module cache; subsequent reinstalls reuse the cache and finish in seconds.

GOBIN="$HOME/.local/bin" go install -trimpath -ldflags="-s -w" \
    github.com/tasanakorn/stele/apps/steop@main

Why @main and not @latest? stele is a monorepo — apps/steop/ is a subdirectory module, so Go's proxy only recognises release tags prefixed with apps/steop/vX.Y.Z. Rather than maintaining a parallel tag stream just for steop, we install from the main branch HEAD. The resulting binary records a Go pseudo-version (e.g. v0.0.0-20260410133000-abc123def456) in its build metadata, but steop version continues to report the human-facing version from apps/steop/version.go — currently 0.4.1.

To pin a different point, replace @main:

• @<commit-sha> — exact commit (the most reliable pin for reproducibility)
• @<branch-name> — tip of a feature branch

To see which commit a currently-installed binary was built from:

go version -m "$(which steop)" | grep vcs

Step 5: Initialize the Local Store

steop now keeps session state, storage blobs, and hook logs in a local SQLite DB at $XDG_DATA_HOME/steop/steop.db (defaults to ~/.local/share/steop/steop.db). Pre-create it so the first hook fires without paying the schema-init cost:

steop db init

This prints the resolved DB path and exits 0. Re-running is a no-op — the schema is versioned and migrations are idempotent.

Step 6: Verify Installation

Check that steop is reachable on PATH:

which steop && steop version

If steop is not found, ~/.local/bin is probably not on PATH. Offer the snippet for their shell rc file (~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc):

export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

Then re-open their shell and retry steop version. If it still fails, stop and ask the user to troubleshoot their PATH.

Step 7: Next Steps

Tell the user:

• The steop plugin hooks invoke steop as a bare command, so ~/.local/bin must remain on your PATH whenever Claude Code runs. If it is not, the hooks will fail silently (Claude Code tolerates hook failures as advisory).
• Restart Claude Code so newly-registered hooks pick up the freshly installed binary.
• steop's runtime state is stored in the stele server. If you have not installed stele yet, run /stele:install — steop reuses stele's ~/.config/stele/config.toml profile.
• To see a live pipeline status in your Claude Code status bar, run /steop:statusline-setup next.
• To rebuild from a local checkout during development, run apps/steop/scripts/build.sh — it builds from your working tree instead of the Go proxy and installs to ~/.local/bin.