codewhale

Install and run CodeWhale, the agentic terminal for open-source and open-weight coding models, from GitHub release artifacts.

Previously published as deepseek-tui. See docs/REBRAND.md in the upstream repository for the migration notes; the legacy deepseek-tui npm package remains a deprecation shim through the v0.8.x transition.

Install

npm install -g codewhale
# or
pnpm add -g codewhale

For project-local usage:

npm install codewhale
npx codewhale --help

postinstall tries to download platform binaries into bin/downloads/ and exposes codewhale and codewhale-tui commands. If GitHub release assets are temporarily unreachable, install continues and the wrapper retries the download on first run.

First run

codewhale login --api-key "YOUR_DEEPSEEK_API_KEY"
codewhale doctor
codewhale

The codewhale facade and codewhale-tui binary share ~/.deepseek/config.toml for DeepSeek auth and default model settings. Common TUI commands are available directly through the facade, including codewhale doctor, codewhale models, codewhale sessions, and codewhale resume --last.

The app talks to DeepSeek's documented OpenAI-compatible Chat Completions API. Set DEEPSEEK_BASE_URL only if you need the China endpoint or DeepSeek beta features such as strict tool mode, chat prefix completion, or FIM completion.

NVIDIA NIM-hosted DeepSeek V4 Pro is also supported:

codewhale auth set --provider nvidia-nim --api-key "YOUR_NVIDIA_API_KEY"
codewhale --provider nvidia-nim

For a single process, set DEEPSEEK_PROVIDER=nvidia-nim and NVIDIA_API_KEY or NVIDIA_NIM_API_KEY (with DEEPSEEK_API_KEY as a compatibility fallback). The NIM default model is deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-pro and the default base URL is https://integrate.api.nvidia.com/v1. With --provider nvidia-nim, --model deepseek-v4-flash maps to deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4-flash.

Supported platforms

Prebuilt binaries for the GitHub release are downloaded automatically:

• Linux x64
• Linux arm64 (v0.8.8+)
• macOS x64 / arm64
• Windows x64

Other platform/architecture combinations (musl, riscv64, FreeBSD, …) aren't shipped as prebuilts. Unsupported platforms, checksum failures, and glibc compatibility problems still fail with a clear error pointing you at cargo install codewhale-cli codewhale-tui --locked and the full docs/INSTALL.md build-from-source guide.

Configuration

• Default binary version comes from codewhaleBinaryVersion in package.json (with deepseekBinaryVersion as a backward-compat fallback).
• Set DEEPSEEK_TUI_VERSION or DEEPSEEK_VERSION to override the release version.
• Set DEEPSEEK_TUI_GITHUB_REPO or DEEPSEEK_GITHUB_REPO to override the source repo (defaults to Hmbown/CodeWhale).
• Set DEEPSEEK_TUI_RELEASE_BASE_URL to use an internal or mirrored release-asset directory when GitHub Releases is unavailable. The directory must contain codewhale-artifacts-sha256.txt and the platform binaries.
• Set DEEPSEEK_TUI_FORCE_DOWNLOAD=1 to force download even when the cached binary is already present.
• Set DEEPSEEK_TUI_DISABLE_INSTALL=1 to skip install-time download.
• Set DEEPSEEK_TUI_OPTIONAL_INSTALL=1 to make install-time retryable download failures warn and exit 0 instead of failing npm install.

Release integrity

• npm publish runs a release-asset check to ensure all required binary assets exist for the target GitHub release before publishing.
• Install-time downloads are verified against the release checksum manifest before the wrapper marks them executable.