Installation

The JITX CLI is the jitx command. This page covers getting it onto your machine — just enough to scaffold your first project. Everything else (the JITX runtime, signing in) happens from inside the scaffolded project, where the project’s own environment determines the right versions.

Requirements

• Python 3.12 or later

• macOS, Linux, or Windows

Install the CLI

With uv (recommended)

We recommend uv, a fast Python package manager that handles every Python-related step in this guide — running the CLI, creating the virtual environment, and installing your project. If you don’t have it yet, it’s a one-line install:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh                                # macOS / Linux
# powershell -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"                   # Windows

(Or brew install uv, winget install astral-sh.uv, etc. — see the uv installation docs.)

With uv installed, run the CLI on demand with uvx, with nothing else to install:

uvx jitx --help

uvx fetches and runs jitx in a throwaway environment. This is ideal for the one command you run before a project exists: scaffolding it. After that, the CLI is installed into the project itself (see Creating a New Project) and you run jitx directly.

With pip

If you’d rather not install uv, you can bootstrap with plain pip — but note that a bare pip install jitx no longer works on most systems: Python installations that ship with an OS or with Homebrew are externally managed and refuse system-wide pip installs (error: externally-managed-environment). Install jitx into a virtual environment instead:

python -m venv ~/.venvs/jitx
source ~/.venvs/jitx/bin/activate
pip install jitx

With that environment active, you have a jitx command for scaffolding.

Warning

This bootstrap environment is only for scaffolding the project. Remember to deactivate it once your project exists — the project gets its own virtual environment with jitx installed in it, and leaving the bootstrap environment active makes it easy to install things into the wrong place. The next page calls out exactly when to deactivate.

With the CLI available, continue to Creating a New Project.