Grok Build (grok)

Grok Build is SpaceXAI's terminal-based AI coding agent. It runs as a full-screen TUI that understands your codebase, edits files, executes shell commands, searches the web, and manages long-running tasks — interactively, headlessly for scripting/CI, or embedded in editors via the Agent Client Protocol (ACP).

Installing the released binary · Building from source · Documentation · Repository layout · Development · Contributing · License

Learn more about Grok Build at x.ai/cli

This repository contains the Rust source for the grok CLI/TUI and its agent runtime. It is synced periodically from the SpaceXAI monorepo.

A small SOURCE_REV file at the root records the full monorepo commit SHA for the version of the code present in this tree.

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Installing the released binary

Prebuilt binaries are published for macOS, Linux, and Windows:

curl -fsSL https://x.ai/cli/install.sh | bash   # macOS / Linux / Git Bash
irm https://x.ai/cli/install.ps1 | iex          # Windows PowerShell
grok --version

See the changelog for the latest fixes, features, and improvements in each release.

Building from source

Requirements:

• Rust — the toolchain is pinned by rust-toolchain.toml; rustup installs it automatically on first build.

• DotSlash — required so hermetic tools under bin/ (notably bin/protoc) can download and run. Install it and ensure dotslash is on your PATH before building:

  cargo install dotslash
  # or: prebuilt packages — https://dotslash-cli.com/docs/installation/
  /usr/bin/env dotslash --help   # sanity check
  

• protoc — proto codegen resolves bin/protoc via DotSlash, or falls back to a protoc on PATH / $PROTOC.

• macOS and Linux are supported build hosts; Windows builds are best-effort and not currently tested from this tree.

cargo run -p xai-grok-pager-bin              # build + launch the TUI
cargo build -p xai-grok-pager-bin --release  # release binary: target/release/xai-grok-pager
cargo check -p xai-grok-pager-bin            # fast validation

The binary artifact is named xai-grok-pager; official installs ship it as grok. On first launch it opens your browser to authenticate — see the authentication guide.

Documentation

Full online documentation is available at docs.x.ai/build/overview.

The user guide ships with the pager crate: crates/codegen/xai-grok-pager/docs/user-guide/ — getting started, keyboard shortcuts, slash commands, configuration, theming, MCP servers, skills, plugins, hooks, headless mode, sandboxing, and more.

Repository layout

Path	Contents
crates/codegen/xai-grok-pager-bin	Composition-root package; builds the xai-grok-pager binary
crates/codegen/xai-grok-pager	The TUI: scrollback, prompt, modals, rendering
crates/codegen/xai-grok-shell	Agent runtime + leader/stdio/headless entry points
crates/codegen/xai-grok-tools	Tool implementations (terminal, file edit, search, ...)
crates/codegen/xai-grok-workspace	Host filesystem, VCS, execution, checkpoints
crates/codegen/...	The rest of the CLI crate closure (config, MCP, markdown, sandbox, ...)
crates/common/, crates/build/, prod/mc/	Small shared leaf crates pulled in by the closure
third_party/	Vendored upstream source (Mermaid diagram stack) — see below

Important

The root Cargo.toml (workspace members, dependency versions, lints, profiles) is generated — treat it as read-only. Prefer editing per-crate Cargo.toml files.

Development

cargo check -p <crate>        # always target specific crates; full-workspace builds are slow
cargo test -p xai-grok-config # per-crate tests
cargo clippy -p <crate>       # lint config: clippy.toml at the repo root
cargo fmt --all               # rustfmt.toml at the repo root

Contributing

Note

External contributions are not accepted. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

First-party code in this repository is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 — see LICENSE.

Third-party and vendored code remains under its original licenses. See:

• THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES — crates.io / git dependencies, bundled UI themes, and in-tree source ports (including openai/codex and sst/opencode tool implementations)
• crates/codegen/xai-grok-tools/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md — crate-local notice for the codex and opencode ports (license texts + Apache §4(b) change notice)
• third_party/NOTICE — vendored Mermaid-stack index