Installation

FlowForge is a developer productivity framework that integrates with Claude Code to enforce professional software development practices, track time automatically, and orchestrate specialist agents. This page walks through installing the package and verifying the setup.

Prerequisites

Before installing FlowForge, make sure the following are available on your machine:

• Node.js 18 or later — @flowforge/core targets node >=18.0.0 and runs on Node’s native ES module support. Check with node --version.
• Git — FlowForge is a git-centric framework; every session is tied to a branch and commits are validated against FlowForge rules.
• Claude Code — FlowForge’s rule enforcement and agent orchestration run as hooks inside Claude Code. Install it from docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/claude-code.
• Go 1.24.2 or later (optional) — only required if you want to build the companion flowforge binary (source at cmd/flowforge/main.go) from source.

Install via npm (recommended)

The core package is published as @flowforge/core. It is a library package — it does not ship a global flowforge shell command today; its commands (session:start, session:end, dev:status, dev:checkrules, help) are invoked from the Claude Code hook runtime, which imports the package and dispatches through the command registry.

Install it as a project-local dev dependency:

npm install --save-dev @flowforge/core

Or, if you just want the library available for scripting:

npm install -g @flowforge/core

Companion Go binary (optional)

The repository also provides a small Go binary at cmd/flowforge/main.go that accepts --project and --session flags and is used by some runtime integrations. Build it from source with a Go 1.24.2+ toolchain:

go build -o flowforge ./cmd/flowforge

Verify the installation

Because @flowforge/core is a library without a "bin" entry, the right way to verify the install is to inspect the installed package:

# Confirm the package is on disk
ls node_modules/@flowforge/core/package.json

# Print the installed version
node -e "console.log(require('@flowforge/core/package.json').version)"

The available commands (session:start, session:end, dev:status, dev:checkrules, and help) are the ones registered in the built-in command registry at packages/core/src/commands/registry.ts. Inside Claude Code, invoke them through the hook runtime (typically surfaced as slash commands); the help command enumerates the registry at run time.

Next steps

With the package installed, the next step is to bootstrap your first project and run your first tracked session. Continue to First Session.