Crab Release Binaries

This repository hosts release artifacts for Crab, a serverless git remote storage solution for repositories with large files.

Crab stores repository data directly in cloud object storage such as S3, GCS, or Azure Blob Storage. There is no separate Git server, database, or LFS endpoint to operate. The CLI works as both a normal crab command and the git-remote-crab helper that lets Git speak to crab://... remotes.

What Crab Is For

Crab is built for teams that want Git workflows with object-storage economics:

• Store large binaries, model files, datasets, and generated artifacts outside a central Git server.
• Deduplicate large file content with content-defined chunking and compressed xorb storage.
• Clone and hydrate files on demand instead of downloading every large object up front.
• Keep normal Git operations recognizable: clone, add, commit, push, hydrate, dehydrate, fsck, gc, and status.

Release Contents

GitHub Releases in this repository may contain two families of artifacts:

• Crab CLI: standalone command-line binaries.
• Crab Desktop: desktop installers and auto-update manifests.

The CLI release set is:

Platform	CPU	Asset
macOS	Apple Silicon	crab-darwin-aarch64.tar.gz
macOS	Intel	crab-darwin-x86_64.tar.gz
Linux	ARM64	crab-linux-aarch64.tar.gz
Linux	x86_64	crab-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
Windows	ARM64	crab-windows-aarch64.zip
Windows	x86_64	crab-windows-x86_64.zip

Each CLI release also includes SHA256SUMS.txt for checksum verification.

Install The CLI

Download the archive for your platform from the latest release, verify it, then put crab on your PATH.

On macOS or Linux:

tar -xzf crab-<platform>-<arch>.tar.gz
chmod +x crab
sudo mv crab /usr/local/bin/crab
sudo ln -sf /usr/local/bin/crab /usr/local/bin/git-remote-crab
crab --version

On Windows PowerShell:

Expand-Archive .\crab-windows-x86_64.zip -DestinationPath .\crab
.\crab\crab.exe --version

Add the extracted directory to PATH if you want crab available from every shell. For Git remote helper support on Windows, make sure crab.exe is on PATH as git-remote-crab.exe or through an equivalent command shim.

Verify Downloads

On macOS:

shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS.txt

On Linux:

sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS.txt

On Windows PowerShell:

Get-FileHash .\crab-windows-x86_64.zip -Algorithm SHA256

Compare the hash with the matching line in SHA256SUMS.txt.

First Commands

After installing, start with:

crab --help
crab doctor

Typical repository workflows use Crab as a Git remote helper:

git clone crab://<bucket-or-container>/<repo>
cd <repo>
crab track "*.bin"
git add .gitattributes model.bin
git commit -m "track large model"
git push

Files that are stored as Crab pointers can be materialized later with:

crab hydrate <path>

Desktop Auto-Update

Crab Desktop uses this repository for update metadata. Release assets such as latest-mac.yml, latest-linux.yml, and latest.yml are consumed by the desktop auto-updater when desktop builds are published.

Maintainer Notes

This repository is a binary distribution repo. Source code and release tooling live in the main Crab monorepo.

The CLI release contract is the six-platform matrix listed above. The local release script can build Windows MSVC artifacts from macOS with cargo-xwin, so a macOS maintainer can produce the full CLI matrix when Docker, Rust targets, LLVM, cargo-xwin, and release evidence are available.

For local archive generation from the monorepo:

cd crab
make release-list
make release-macos-full

Publishing to this repository is handled by the release workflow or by the monorepo release script after the retained enterprise release evidence gate has passed.

Links

• Website: crab.build
• Documentation: crab.build/docs
• Releases: github.com/crabbuild/crab-release/releases