helpofai

The terminal coding agent for any model — open models first.

HelpOfAi is a Rust TUI and CLI for 24 providers — DeepSeek, OpenRouter, Hugging Face, and local vLLM/SGLang/Ollama are first-class routes, and it speaks natively to Anthropic Claude and OpenAI when that's what you have — with approval-gated tools, OS sandboxing, side-git snapshots, and /restore rollback.

This npm package is a small launcher: it downloads the matching native HelpOfAi binaries for your platform, verifies them against the release SHA-256 manifest, and installs the helpofai, hoa, and helpofai-tui commands. The application state and credentials still live in HelpOfAi's normal config files, not inside node_modules.

Previously published as deepseek-tui. See docs/REBRAND.md for the migration notes; the legacy deepseek-tui npm package is deprecated and receives no further releases.

Install

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

For project-local usage:

npm install helpofai
npx helpofai --help

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

First run

helpofai auth set --provider deepseek
helpofai auth status
helpofai doctor
helpofai

Every provider is the same one-line shape — --provider openrouter, --provider huggingface, --provider ollama, or --provider anthropic for a Claude key; the full registry lives in docs/PROVIDERS.md.

The helpofai facade and helpofai-tui binary share ~/.helpofai/config.toml for auth and default model settings. Legacy ~/.deepseek/config.toml installs are still read as a compatibility fallback. Common TUI commands are available directly through the facade, including helpofai doctor, helpofai models, helpofai sessions, and helpofai resume --last.

Supported platforms

Prebuilt binaries for the GitHub release are downloaded automatically:

• Linux x64
• Linux arm64
• Linux riscv64
• macOS x64 / arm64
• Windows x64

HarmonyOS PC (openharmony) is treated as linux, so it gets the Linux binaries matching your CPU architecture (x64, arm64, or riscv64). Other platform/architecture combinations (musl, 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 helpofai-cli helpofai-tui --locked and the full docs/INSTALL.md build-from-source guide.

Wrapper configuration

| Setting | What it does | | --- | --- | | helpofaiBinaryVersion in package.json | Default native binary version. deepseekBinaryVersion is still read as a backward-compat fallback. | | HELPOFAI_RELEASE_BASE_URL | Canonical override: use an internal or mirrored release-asset directory when GitHub Releases is unavailable. The directory must contain helpofai-artifacts-sha256.txt and the platform binaries. DEEPSEEK_TUI_RELEASE_BASE_URL and DEEPSEEK_RELEASE_BASE_URL are the implemented legacy fallbacks. | | HELPOFAI_USE_CNB_MIRROR=1 | Download release assets from the CNB (China-friendly) mirror instead of GitHub. | | DEEPSEEK_TUI_VERSION or DEEPSEEK_VERSION | Override the GitHub release version to download. | | DEEPSEEK_TUI_GITHUB_REPO or DEEPSEEK_GITHUB_REPO | Override the source repo. Defaults to helpofai/HelpOfAi-Cli. | | DEEPSEEK_TUI_FORCE_DOWNLOAD=1 | Force download even when the cached binary is already present. | | DEEPSEEK_TUI_DISABLE_INSTALL=1 | Skip install-time download. | | DEEPSEEK_TUI_OPTIONAL_INSTALL=1 | Make install-time retryable download failures warn and exit 0 instead of failing npm install. | | DEEPSEEK_TUI_SKIP_GLIBC_CHECK=1 | Bypass the Linux glibc preflight check at your own risk (DEEPSEEK_SKIP_GLIBC_CHECK=1 also works). |

Proxies

Downloads respect HTTPS_PROXY / HTTP_PROXY (CONNECT tunneling included) and NO_PROXY, so the wrapper works behind corporate proxies. For fully offline installs, set DEEPSEEK_TUI_DISABLE_INSTALL=1 or point HELPOFAI_RELEASE_BASE_URL at a local mirror.

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.

Links

• Repository: https://github.com/helpofai/HelpOfAi-Cli
• Website: https://helpofai.net/
• Provider registry: docs/PROVIDERS.md
• Changelog: CHANGELOG.md