Installation

carrel runs on Linux (x86_64 and arm64) and macOS (Apple silicon).

Prebuilt binaries

Download the archive for your platform from the latest release, unpack it and put carrel on your PATH:

tar xzf carrel-v*-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
install carrel-v*/carrel ~/.local/bin/

Each archive comes with a .sha256 checksum.

With bin

bin picks the right archive for your platform, unpacks it and keeps track of the version:

bin install github.com/arunoruto/carrel
bin update carrel                          # later, to get a new release

Nix

The repository is a flake:

nix run github:arunoruto/carrel           # try it
nix profile install github:arunoruto/carrel

or as a flake input, using its package or overlay:

{
  inputs.carrel.url = "github:arunoruto/carrel";
  # environment.systemPackages = [ inputs.carrel.packages.${pkgs.system}.default ];
  # or: nixpkgs.overlays = [ inputs.carrel.overlays.default ];  then pkgs.carrel
}

The Nix package comes with its text extractor (Python with pymupdf4llm from nixpkgs), so nothing is downloaded at runtime and extraction works offline.

With Cargo

cargo install --git https://github.com/arunoruto/carrel

The text extractor

Turning PDFs into text and figures is done by an external command (see Configuration). Outside of Nix the default runs pymupdf4llm through uv, so install uv; it fetches pymupdf4llm on first use. Without it, papers are still added, just without their text.