Installation

Prerequisites

• git, on PATH — pollen shells out to it for every remote source.
• Rust ≥ 1.97.1, only to build from source.

Homebrew

On macOS and Linux:

brew install groupbees/tap/pollen

The formula installs the release archive for your platform, so nothing is compiled; brew upgrade picks up each new release.

Release archives

Download the archive for your platform from the releases — macOS on Apple Silicon and Intel, Linux on x86_64 and arm64 as .tar.gz, Windows on x86_64 and arm64 as .zip. The Linux binaries are statically linked, so they run on any distribution; the Windows ones need no Visual C++ runtime. Unpack the archive and put pollen (pollen.exe on Windows) on your PATH. SHA256SUMS on the same page lists the archives’ checksums:

sha256sum --check --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS

On Windows, compare the output of this PowerShell command with the archive’s line in SHA256SUMS:

Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 pollen-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc-v*.zip

Install or upgrade script

The pollen skill ships two scripts that download a release, check it against SHA256SUMS and install the binary, the same command upgrading in place:

curl -fsSLO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/groupbees/pollen/main/skills/pollen/scripts/install.sh
bash install.sh                     # latest release → ~/.local/bin
bash install.sh v0.4.0 /opt/bin     # a given release, elsewhere

Invoke-WebRequest https://raw.githubusercontent.com/groupbees/pollen/main/skills/pollen/scripts/install.ps1 -OutFile install.ps1
./install.ps1                       # latest release → %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\pollen, added to PATH

Once the skill is installed, an agent runs them from its own copy (~/.claude/skills/pollen/scripts/). With Homebrew, prefer brew upgrade: install.sh hands over to it when brew installed pollen.

Or build it from source:

cargo install --git https://github.com/groupbees/pollen

Python package

The pollen-skills package carries its own copy of the engine, so the binary is not needed. It installs the pollen command, and a Python API:

uv tool install pollen-skills   # or: pipx install pollen-skills

python -m pollen runs the same command through the Python interpreter, for machines whose policy blocks executables that are not signed, such as a downloaded pollen.exe.

See Python for the API.