Requirements

System#

Officially tested on macOS, Linux, and Windows (PowerShell). WSL2 works the same as native Linux.

Languages#

You don't need the language toolchain installed for the language you're indexing, because repowise parses source statically with tree-sitter. The one exception is TypeScript monorepos, where having tsc available improves resolver accuracy for path-mapped imports.

See Language support for the full 16-language coverage matrix.

LLM provider (optional)#

Not a requirement. repowise init never needs an API key. Without a provider it renders the whole wiki from your code's structure and exits 0. You get the graph, git signals, hotspots, ownership, code health, dead code, decision archaeology, and a complete set of wiki pages. See Deterministic wiki.

A provider is what buys you model-written prose and, with an embedder, semantic search. When you want that, bring the key:

• Anthropic: default. ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
• OpenAI: OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-... plus --provider openai
• Gemini: GEMINI_API_KEY=... plus --provider gemini
• Ollama: fully offline. --provider ollama, no key needed.

To guarantee a run spends nothing even when a key is present in the environment, pass --no-prose.

Optional but useful#

• uv for an isolated install (uv tool install repowise).
• A second machine for hosted indexing: if you'd rather not run Python at all, the hosted version manages all of this for you.