aia-cli

aia-cli

Keep folders on your device in sync with AIA, your own knowledge graph.

Install

On a Mac (Apple silicon or Intel), or Linux on x86_64, one line installs aia for your user, with no password and no Python needed. It fetches AIA's engine for this computer from your deployment (here the hosted one; your own serves the same script at its own address):

curl -fsSL https://app.013a.tech/install.sh | sh
aia folder add notes ~/Documents/notes

The script checks the engine's SHA-256 before it installs it under ~/Library/Application Support/AIA (Linux: ~/.local/share/aia), links aia into ~/.local/bin, signs this computer in (aia login opens your browser at the sign-in page with the code filled in, and waits until you have signed in) and starts AIA in the background. sh -s -- --no-login after the pipe stops after the install; sh -s -- --help lists the rest, exit codes included.

Anywhere with Python 3.10 or newer, install the package from PyPI with pipx instead:

pipx install "aia-cli[watch,channel]"
aia login --url https://api.013a.tech
aia folder add notes ~/Documents/notes
aia service install          # keep AIA running in the background

The package is aia-cli; the command it installs is aia. A package called aia on PyPI belongs to an unrelated project: pip install aia installs someone else's code. That project also installs a Python module named aia, so the two cannot share an environment: whichever loads second breaks the other. pipx gives aia an environment of its own. Without pipx, install with pip into a virtual environment that holds nothing else.

The same install.sh, run as a file beside a wheel, installs that wheel, and --wheel FILE names one; a Mac ships Python 3.9, so there it downloads a pinned CPython from python-build-standalone and checks its SHA-256 first.

Where a release comes from

Every version on PyPI is built by CI from the tag cli-v<version>, which must name the version the package declares. The release keeps SHA256SUMS for the wheel and the sdist, a SLSA provenance statement naming the commit and the pipeline that built them, and a minisign signature over both, checked against the release key below before anything is uploaded. After the upload it compares the SHA-256 PyPI serves for each file with SHA256SUMS, and any difference fails the release. To check a release yourself, ask support@013a.tech for its files, then:

minisign -Vm SHA256SUMS -P <the release key>
minisign -Vm aia_cli-<version>.provenance.json -P <the release key>
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS

The release key:

RWTTmOTyJEm+M0inq5FoBCOsMY3vil/aMLfn0C6KbOIR4zqATOAecVmN

Releases up to 0.1.9 were signed with the previous key, retired on 2026-10-19: RWSVfBZY/SJjE2WsgLMqe1PCawH+/PVD29Ic396wRIrOCGxf6WGsrNwZ.

What it does

aia binds a folder to a source and sends what changes. The documents travel as bytes: the platform extracts the text, so a PDF reads the same however the folder was synced, and upgrading the converters does not mean re-sending a corpus.

An engine runs in the background, watches the folders you bound, coalesces a burst of edits into one sync, and reconciles on an interval because file events are lossy. aia itself is a renderer over the engine's methods, and runs them in-process when no engine is running.

What it will not do

• It never sends your AIA credentials. The configuration home holds this device's token and its private key, and a folder that is it, contains it, or sits inside it is refused by name.
• It stops a whole sync when it finds a secret. A file whose name says what it is (.env, id_rsa, *.pem) or whose contents match a credential pattern holds the sync until you allow that exact path. A partial sync that quietly skipped something is how a corpus ends up wrong in a way nobody sees.
• It listens on nothing. The engine serves its methods over a Unix socket in an owner-only directory and checks the peer's user id before reading a byte. There is no network listener; everything towards your deployment is outbound.
• It never writes to your files. Removing a folder stops syncing it; nothing here creates, moves or deletes anything on your disk.

What is installed

cryptography, for the Ed25519 signature on every request. Nothing else is required. Two extras are available and neither is needed to sync:

pip install "aia-cli[watch]"     # platform file events instead of polling
pip install "aia-cli[channel]"   # reachable from your tools, over an outbound socket

The distribution deliberately carries none of the server's dependencies. If pip install aia-cli ever brings in liboqs, Neo4j, torch, FastAPI or a document converter, that is a bug and the import-closure gate in CI should have caught it.

Exit codes

Every failure prints error: and the one thing to do next. A problem the command did not expect writes its details to ~/.config/aia/cli.log and says so; --debug shows them in the terminal instead. aia --version names the build, which is what a bug report needs.

Licence

Proprietary: © 013a GmbH, all rights reserved. You may use the connector only under a written agreement with 013a GmbH; for testers, that is the tester agreement. One file it ships, aia/__init__.py, is shared with the open-source verifier and is Apache-2.0. The wheel carries LICENSE and LICENSES/Apache-2.0.txt.