Install

Summary

Meridian is a single Go binary. Most installations are either:

• a local source build
• a release binary download

The runtime and graph features have additional dependencies depending on what commands you plan to use.

Build from source

go build -o ./bin/meridian ./cmd/meridian

Requirements:

• Go 1.25 or newer
• a supported container engine for runtime commands

Install a release binary

curl -fsSL -o meridian.tar.gz https://github.com/salman-frs/meridian/releases/latest/download/meridian-linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar -xzf meridian.tar.gz
./meridian version

Runtime prerequisites

Capability	Requirement
Repo-side validation only	local files and the Meridian binary
Semantic validation via image	Docker or containerd
Runtime commands	Docker, or nerdctl, or lima nerdctl on macOS
SVG graph rendering	Graphviz dot

Engine-specific notes

• auto prefers Docker when both Docker and containerd are available
• Linux containerd expects nerdctl
• macOS containerd uses lima nerdctl

Docs development prerequisites

If you are contributing to the docs site:

python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
python -m pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
go run ./cmd/meridian-docs
mkdocs serve

Read next

• Quickstart
• Runtime Engine Model