Helical CLI

If you have some familiarity with the command line and terminal then you can immediately get started with the helical command line interface (CLI) following the instructions below.

Installation

The instructions below work for Linux, Windows (Cygwin or WSL) or Mac OS. The install.sh script automatically detects your computing environment (Intel or Apple Silicon Mac, Linux AMD64, or Windows) and downloads and installs the appropriately compiled and optimised binary for your use.

If you run into any issues, then please contact us.

First open the respective terminal tool.

Then download the install script:

curl -sS https://helicalco.com/install.sh > install.sh

It is good security practice to inspect any install.sh script before you run it but this is up to you.

To install helical as a local user (or if you don't have administrative privileges)

$ bash install.sh

Then press enter for the default installation of the helical binary into the ~/.local/bin/ directory in your local user home directory. The install script will attempt to add this path to your bash profile but you may need to do this manually if needed, e.g. add export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin to your .profile or equivalent.

To install the helical command line interface (CLI) for all users of the machine requires administrative sudo privileges and will install the binary to /usr/local/helical/bin.

sudo bash install.sh

For Linux installs a system wide installation will also create a helical user group and add the current user to it. Any users added to this group will have the permissions necessary to run the helical update command.

For system-wide installations it is recommended to add /usr/local/helical/bin to the system-wide PATH variable in /etc/environment. After doing this run set -a; source /etc/environment; set +a to activate the variable in your local terminal and verify installation by running helical --version.

If users want to manage their own helical versions then they should copy the helical binary to a local bin directory and make their local directory take precedence in their PATH.

Licensing

helical is a proprietary software offered for use under specific license terms.

To get started, simply access a free license by executing the command helical auth login and follow the user-friendly prompts.

We offer a free license for all qualified academic research purposes.

For commercial ventures, a paid license subscription is required to harness the full capabilities of helical and to get full personalised technical support.

Our team is more than happy to provide further details, discuss your requirements, and help you make an informed decision. Feel free to contact us for a personalized consultation.

Updating

The software is trivially updated by running

$ helical update

If the binary was installed with sudo privileges then only root users can update the binary. Otherwise users added to the helical user group should also have permission - contact your sysadmin for help.

The helical update command always updates to the latest version, to update (or rollback) the binary to a specific version use

$ helical update -v VERSION_NUM

where VERSION_NUM is the version number you want to upgrade (or rollback) to.