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Installation

Requirements

  • Python 3.11 or later
  • No API key required for the core library

Check your Python version

python3 --version
If it says 3.9 or 3.10, see below.

Install

pip3.11 install extremis

With extras

Install only what you need:

Extra What it adds Install
wrap-anthropic Drop-in Claude client wrapper pip3.11 install "extremis[wrap-anthropic]"
wrap-openai Drop-in OpenAI client wrapper pip3.11 install "extremis[wrap-openai]"
mcp MCP server for Claude Desktop / Code pip3.11 install "extremis[mcp]"
postgres Postgres + pgvector backend pip3.11 install "extremis[postgres]"
chroma ChromaDB backend pip3.11 install "extremis[chroma]"
pinecone Pinecone backend pip3.11 install "extremis[pinecone]"
openai OpenAI embeddings (replaces local model) pip3.11 install "extremis[openai]"
server REST API server (FastAPI + uvicorn) pip3.11 install "extremis[server]"
client HTTP client for hosted server pip3.11 install "extremis[client]"
all Everything pip3.11 install "extremis[all]"

First run note

On first recall(), extremis downloads all-MiniLM-L6-v2 (~90 MB) from HuggingFace. This is a one-time download cached to ~/.cache/huggingface/.

To skip the download entirely, use OpenAI embeddings:

pip3.11 install "extremis[openai]"

EXTREMIS_EMBEDDER=text-embedding-3-small
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...

Older Python

brew install python@3.11
/opt/homebrew/bin/pip3.11 install extremis

sudo apt install python3.11 python3.11-pip
pip3.11 install extremis

Download Python 3.11+ from python.org/downloads. Then: 

pip install extremis

Verify

import extremis
mem = extremis.Extremis()
mem.remember("test", conversation_id="verify")
results = mem.recall("test")
print(results[0].memory.content)  # → "test"
print("✓ extremis working")

Or run the interactive demo:

extremis-demo