Tau — Quickstart

Action × Acquisition

Run Tau headless against a repository and read the session tree it produces.

1. Install it

Tau needs Python 3.11 or newer. The distribution is ffwf-tau — the guessable name, a meta package that pulls ffwf-tau-coding-agent[tui] at the same version. The ffwf- prefix is load-bearing rather than branding: tau-ai and tau-llm on PyPI are unrelated third-party projects, so a command missing the prefix installs someone else's code.

Everything below installs the same release. Pick the installer you already use.

uv

uv tool install gives Tau its own environment and puts the commands on PATH, which is what you want for something you run as a program rather than import as a library:

uv tool install ffwf-tau
tau --version

To try it without installing anything, run it straight from the index:

uvx --from ffwf-tau tau

Inside a project that already has a uv environment — an extension you are writing, or a host embedding the SDK — add it as a dependency instead:

uv add ffwf-tau

pipx

Same shape as uv tool: one isolated environment per application.

pipx install ffwf-tau
tau --version

pip

pip installs into whichever environment is active, so make one. A modern system Python is marked externally managed and will refuse a bare pip install (PEP 668) rather than write into the OS's own site-packages.

python3 -m venv .venv
./.venv/bin/pip install ffwf-tau
./.venv/bin/tau --version

Activate the environment (source .venv/bin/activate) if you would rather type tau than the path to it.

Skipping the TUI, and the second command name

The meta package includes the TUI. If a deployment only ever runs tau -p or --mode rpc, install ffwf-tau-coding-agent without the [tui] extra instead — Textual and Rich are the only thing an interactive tau needs that a headless one does not, and without the extra tau -p and tau --mode rpc still run a full turn, extensions and all. Measured: 15 packages and 13 MB without the extra, 27 packages and 31 MB with it:

uv tool install ffwf-tau-coding-agent      # or pipx install / pip install

Every install puts two commands on PATH, tau and ffwf-tau. They are one entry point behind two wrappers, not a symlink, and they uninstall together. Type tau at a terminal. Write ffwf-tau in a systemd unit, a Dockerfile, or a cron line — PyPI reserves distribution names but not command names, and an unrelated project ships its own tau, so in an environment holding both, whichever installed last owns the short name.

The DevOps Manual covers the remaining extras ([jmfts] for --store jmfts, ffwf-tau-agent-core[bus] for the nats_bus extension) and the deployment shapes.

The rest of this page is not yet written

Installation is authored. The headless run against a repository, and reading back the session tree it produces, are still scaffolding.