Requirements

  • Node 22.13 or newer, and npm. npm installs and removes the package. Node runs the small opscanvas launcher.
  • A supported computer: macOS on Apple silicon or Intel, Linux on arm64 or x64, or Windows on x64. Windows on arm64 and Linux musl distributions such as Alpine are not currently supported.
  • Network access for the first run. The first opscanvas command downloads the one program file your computer needs and verifies it against a checksum included in the npm package. After that, OpsCanvas runs locally.

No Bun installation is needed. The OpsCanvas background process and MCP server are compiled programs that include their own runtime.

Install

Run both commands. Installing the npm package alone does not register OpsCanvas with any AI tool.

On macOS or Linux, in a terminal:

npm install -g @opscanvas/opscanvas
opscanvas setup

On Windows, in PowerShell or Windows Terminal:

npm install -g @opscanvas/opscanvas
opscanvas setup

What setup does

Run opscanvas setup from an interactive terminal. It:

  1. Registers OpsCanvas at the user level with each supported AI tool it finds on your computer.
  2. Installs its discovery hooks, skill, and the approval the AI tool requires.
  3. Registers and starts its background process: a launch agent on macOS, a systemd --user service on Linux, or a scheduled task on Windows.
  4. Asks where your repositories are located.
  5. Asks which cloud identities you want to use.

Start a new session in any AI tool that was already open when setup ran. Setup is safe to run again; it does not create duplicate registrations.

Some Linux environments do not provide a user-level service manager. Setup reports that instead of pretending the service was registered. Run opscanvas service restart to start OpsCanvas for the current login, and again after each reboot.

Check the background process

opscanvas service status
opscanvas service restart

service status reports what your operating system’s service manager knows. service restart gets the background process running now. Run opscanvas setup again if it should also start automatically at the next login.

Proxies and restricted networks

OpsCanvas honors HTTPS_PROXY and NO_PROXY during the first download. In an air-gapped or restricted environment, an administrator provides an approved mirror and sets OPERATOR_BINARY_BASE_URL to its base URL.

Next

Set up OpsCanvas in your AI tool, then choose your cloud sources.