Getting Started with Hyaline

Welcome to Hyaline (pronounced “HIGH-uh-leen”), a documentation tool that helps software development teams keep their documentation current, accurate, and accessible. This guide will walk you through setting up Hyaline and performing your first documentation extraction and check.

What You’ll Learn

In this guide, you’ll learn how to:

Install the Hyaline CLI
Create a basic configuration file
Extract your current documentation
Set up the MCP server for AI integration

Prerequisites

Operating System: Linux (64-bit), macOS, or Windows (64-bit)
Architecture: AMD64 or ARM64 (ARM64 not available for Windows)
Documentation Source: A documentation source (e.g. git repo, filesystem directory, website)

Step 1: Install the Hyaline CLI

Download the Latest Release

Visit the Hyaline releases page
Download the appropriate binary for your system:
- Linux AMD64: hyaline-linux-amd64.zip
- Linux ARM64: hyaline-linux-arm64.zip
- macOS AMD64: hyaline-darwin-amd64.zip
- macOS ARM64: hyaline-darwin-arm64.zip
- Windows AMD64: hyaline-windows-amd64.zip

Install the Binary

Unzip the downloaded file:
```
$ unzip hyaline-*-*.zip
```
Make the binary executable (Linux/macOS only):
```
$ chmod +x hyaline
```

Move to your PATH (optional but recommended):

# Linux/macOS
$ sudo mv hyaline /usr/local/bin/

# Or add to your local bin directory
$ mv hyaline ~/bin/

Verify the installation:
```
$ hyaline version
```

For detailed installation instructions, see How To: Install the CLI.

Step 2: Create a Configuration File

Create a hyaline.yml file in your project root. Here’s a basic configuration for a typical project that has a locally checked-out git repo and main branch:

systems:
  - id: my-app
    documentation:
      - id: main-docs
        type: md
        extractor:
          type: git
          options:
            path: .
            branch: main
          include: 
            - "README.md"
            - "docs/**/*.md"
            - "**/*.md"
          exclude:
            - "node_modules/**/*"
            - ".git/**/*"
        documents:
          - name: README.md
            purpose: Provide an overview of the project, installation instructions, and basic usage examples
            required: true
          - name: docs/installation.md
            purpose: Detailed installation and setup instructions
            required: false

Configuration Breakdown

systems: Define your projects/systems
documentation: Specify where your docs are located
documents: Define expected documentation structure and purposes

Note that the above configuration is for a simple example, but Hyaline can be configured to extract documentation from multiple systems and sources (e.g. websites, remote git repositories). For complete configuration options and details, see the Configuration Reference.

Step 3: Extract Current Documentation

Now let’s extract your current documentation into a data set (note that you will need to run this from the root of the documentation source):

$ hyaline extract current \
  --config ./hyaline.yml \
  --system my-app \
  --output ./current.db

This command will:

Scan your repository for documentation files
Extract and organize them by system
Store everything in a SQLite database (current.db)

For more details on how extraction works, see Explanation: Extract Current.

Step 4: Set Up MCP Server

To make your documentation available to AI assistants like Claude:

Extract current documentation (if not already done):

hyaline extract current --config ./hyaline.yml --system my-app --output ./current.db

Start the MCP server:

hyaline mcp stdio --current ./current.db

Configure your AI client to use the MCP server. The exact steps depend on your client, but you’ll typically need to add a server configuration that runs the command above.

For detailed MCP setup instructions, see How To: Run the MCP Server and MCP Reference.

Next Steps

To set up GitHub Actions for automatic PR checks visit How To: Check a PR, or see the CLI Reference for complete command documentation.