Picking a Vox bundle

Vox ships as pre-assembled tarballs called bundles. Each bundle contains the vox binary plus a curated set of plugins for a particular workload. Choose the smallest bundle that covers your use case; you can always add more plugins later with vox plugin install <id>.

Quick-reference table

Use case	Bundle
Local dev with full web-stack skills	`vox-fullstack`
Local ML training (NVIDIA GPU)	`vox-ml`
Headless backend / API server	`vox-server`
Mesh node (inter-process / distributed)	`vox-mesh`
Cloud-managed client (thin node)	`vox-cloud-only`
Edge / on-device inference	`vox-edge`
Power user (every plugin, every skill)	`vox-dev`
Build your own from scratch	`vox-base` + `vox plugin install ...`

Bundle contents

Run vox bundle list to see all bundles with their resolved plugin counts, or vox bundle build --help for assembly options.

Each bundle extends one or more parent bundles through an extends chain:

vox-base                   (no plugins)
  └── vox-server           (core skill plugins)
        ├── vox-fullstack  (+ web / frontend skills)
        ├── vox-mesh       (+ distributed-mesh skill)
        └── vox-cloud-only (subset — no local-inference plugins)
vox-ml                     (base + GPU/ML plugins; standalone)
vox-edge                   (base + lightweight inference; standalone)
vox-dev                    (extends vox-fullstack + vox-ml + vox-mesh + extras)

Installation

Download the tarball for your platform from the GitHub Releases page, extract it, and add the bin/ directory to your PATH.

# Example: vox-fullstack on Linux x86_64
curl -L -o vox-fullstack.tar.gz \
  https://github.com/vox-foundation/vox/releases/latest/download/vox-fullstack-linux-x86_64.tar.gz

tar -xzf vox-fullstack.tar.gz -C ~/vox

export PATH="$HOME/vox/bin:$PATH"

On Windows (PowerShell):

Invoke-WebRequest `
  -Uri "https://github.com/vox-foundation/vox/releases/latest/download/vox-fullstack-windows-x86_64.tar.gz" `
  -OutFile vox-fullstack.tar.gz

tar -xzf vox-fullstack.tar.gz -C "$env:USERPROFILE\vox"

$env:PATH = "$env:USERPROFILE\vox\bin;$env:PATH"

Verifying a bundle

After downloading, confirm all bundled plugins load correctly:

vox bundle verify vox-fullstack.tar.gz

This extracts the tarball to a temporary directory and runs vox plugin doctor against the extracted plugins root. Exit code 0 means all plugins pass ABI and manifest checks.

Adding plugins after installation

Start from vox-base and add exactly what you need:

# Install just the git skill plugin
vox plugin install vox-plugin-skill-git

# Or apply a whole bundle's plugin set without unpacking a tarball
vox bundle apply vox-server

Building a custom bundle

# Assemble a tarball from whatever is currently installed
vox bundle build vox-base --out my-custom-bundle.tar.gz

# Cross-compile for a different platform
vox bundle build vox-server --target x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu --out vox-server-linux.tar.gz

Building distribution binaries from source

For CI ship artifacts, use the dist profile. It enables fat LTO, single codegen unit, and full symbol stripping — producing the smallest and fastest vox-cli binary:

cargo build --profile dist -p vox-cli

The output lands in target/dist/vox-cli[.exe]. Use cargo build --release for fast local dev builds (thin LTO, no symbol stripping).