Upgrade and uninstall

Tokenade keeps itself up to date: you normally never run an upgrade by hand. When you want to leave, one command undoes everything it set up. This page covers both.

Automatic updates

At most once every 24 hours, any tokenade invocation (a hook, a wrap, the status line) starts a background check. It downloads the release manifest from downloads.tokenade.net, verifies its signature, and, if a newer version exists, swaps the binary atomically. Your agent keeps running; the next call uses the new version.

After the swap, the newly installed binary finishes the job itself: it restarts the local LLM proxies that were running the old version and rewrites the rules files Tokenade maintains for your agents. The options you passed to tokenade install (--no-hook, --only, --no-debug-log…) are kept across upgrades.

Force or control updates

tokenade upgrade # check now and install if newer
tokenade upgrade --check # only print what is available, no swap
tokenade upgrade --off # disable the background check (persistent)
tokenade upgrade --on # re-enable it

self-update is an alias of upgrade. --off writes a marker file, auto-update-off, next to your license. To skip the check for one session only, set TOKENADE_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 in the environment.

On Windows, a running .exe cannot be overwritten, so the old binary is renamed to .old and replaced on the next start.

Installs managed by a package manager

If the directory holding the binary is not writable by you (npm installed globally as root, Homebrew, a system package), the swap is refused with:

binary parent dir … is not writable — likely a system-managed install (npm -g as root, Homebrew, apt, etc.). Update through that package manager instead (e.g. `npm update -g` / `brew upgrade tokenade`).

For an npm install, update with:

npm update -g @tokenade/cli

Uninstall

tokenade uninstall --dry-run # list everything that would be removed, change nothing
tokenade uninstall # full removal

The full command runs seven steps, in this order:

Restores every MCP server that tokenade mcp-wrap wrapped to its original command and args. It runs first, so even a crashed uninstall leaves your MCP servers working.
Strips the fenced  …  block from ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, after taking a backup.
Removes the tokenade entry from mcpServers / mcp in every detected agent config.
Removes every hook group tagged tokenade from ~/.claude/settings.json, and the same for other agents (Codex hooks and their trust entries, Cursor, Copilot, OpenCode, Kilo Code plugins…).
Removes the shell proxy from every shell rc file (.bashrc, .zshenv, .zshrc, config.fish, PowerShell, .cshrc…) and deletes the ~/.tokenade/shellproxy.* fragments.
Deletes Tokenade's data: ~/.tokenade/ (savings ledger, databases, debug log, license) and ~/.cache/tokenade/ (stash, model). Only these two trees are removed, and symlinks are never followed out of them.
Handles the binary according to how it was installed:

Installed with	What uninstall does
npm	Prints `npm uninstall -g @tokenade/cli` (npm owns the binary).
cargo	Prints `cargo uninstall tokenade-cli`.
Homebrew	Prints `brew uninstall tokenade`.
Standalone (`~/.local/bin`, `/usr/local/bin`)	Deletes the binary on Linux and macOS. On Windows, a running `.exe` cannot delete itself, so it prints the `del` command.

The command is idempotent: running it again after a clean uninstall does nothing. If you installed the LLM proxy, uninstall also points each agent back at its original provider address and removes the proxy's start-at-boot entries.

Flags and partial removal

Command	Effect
`tokenade uninstall --keep-data`	Steps 1–5 and 7, but keeps `~/.tokenade` and `~/.cache/tokenade`, so your savings history and license survive a reinstall.
`tokenade uninstall --headless`	Integration and data removal with no banner and no guidance, and never touches the binary. Used by npm's `preuninstall` hook.
`tokenade uninstall aliases`	Removes only the shell proxy (step 5). Hooks, MCP wiring, `CLAUDE.md` and your data stay. Also accepted: `alias`, `shell-proxy`, `shellproxy`.
`tokenade unwrap-mcps`	Runs only step 1.

If you uninstall through npm (npm uninstall -g @tokenade/cli), npm's preuninstall hook runs tokenade uninstall --headless first, so the agent integrations and the data directories are removed along with the package.

Your account and machine slot

Deleting ~/.tokenade removes license.key, so a later reinstall needs tokenade login again. The machine stays listed in your account until you remove it from your dashboard at tokenade.net. There is no logout command: uninstalling, or removing the machine from the dashboard, is how you unlink it.

If credentials may have been captured in Tokenade's caches, run tokenade scrub-cache before uninstalling, or tokenade scrub-secret <substring> for a specific leaked string. With a full uninstall, both trees are deleted anyway.

Reinstall

npm install -g @tokenade/cli
tokenade install
tokenade login

tokenade install reuses the options remembered in ~/.tokenade/install-options.json if you kept your data; pass --defaults to start from scratch. See Install Tokenade.