Radicle is a peer-to-peer, local-first code collaboration stack built on Git.

On March 26th, we announced the first release candidate for Radicle 1.0. Today, after five months of feedback and 17 release candidates, we are ready to launch Radicle 1.0.

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to try Radicle or to reintroduce yourself to the stack, now is a great time to dive in: our website and guides should have all the information you need to get started. You can also browse the latest code, hosted on Radicle.

If you’ve been tagging along, thank you, it’s been a bumpy ride and we couldn’t have done it without you!

Try it out!

You can grab the latest release with the following command:

curl -sSf https://radicle.xyz/install | sh

Or head over to the download section to download and verify the binaries yourself.

What’s in the box 📦

Radicle 1.0 represents the culmination of years of experimentation and hard work from our team and community, where we set out to ensure that free and open source software ecosystems can flourish without having to rely on the whims of Big Tech. We designed Radicle with a first-principles approach, as a natural extension to Git, expanding it to work in a collaborative, local-first, peer-to-peer setting.

This milestone includes:

• An extensible, homegrown, peer-to-peer gossip and sync protocol built on the Git protocol.
• Social interactions such as issues, patches and code review, using our extensible Collaborative Objects system which keeps all artifacts in the repository.
• A secure authentication and authorization protocol using public key cryptography, which allows all published content to be verified locally, without centralized authority.
• An intuitive CLI that should be familiar to users of Git, as well as a web frontend for browsing Radicle repositories and seed nodes.
• Privacy at the protocol level, with truly private repositories and built-in Tor support.
• Reproducible and signed builds for all Radicle binaries.

To us, Radicle 1.0 means that Radicle is ready to use. It stands as a testament that sovereign code forges are possible today, and in our opinion, necessary.

We feel comfortable now inviting you to join us, replicate, and collaborate within the Radicle network or even run a seed node.

For an in-depth explanation of how Radicle works, check out our Protocol Guide.

Stability ⛰️

Radicle 1.0 marks our commitment to stability: from this release onwards, all changes to the protocol will be designed in backwards compatible way, and any necessary change on the CLI will include a seamless upgrade path.

We are aware that the release candidate phase was rockier than expected for some, but we are now in a good place to slow things down and improve stability.

Along with this commitment will come a more dependable and streamlined release process which starts with this release!

Future plans 🔮

There are several things in the pipeline that we intend to release when ready:

• Native CI/CD capabilities
• The Radicle TUI (Terminal User Interface)
• Advanced code review functionality
• An inbox system for repository notifications
• Multi-device support and user profiles
• Support for other canonical references, such as tags
• Seed node moderation and management tools
• The Radicle desktop application

Growing ecosystem 🌱

Outside of the core stack, the ecosystem is growing nicely: an independent team working on integrations & tooling for Radicle has developed a VS Code and JetBrains plugin. The Radicle network now also comprises several deployments of the Radicle frontend, and there are more than 40 seed nodes operating on the network, freely replicating user content.

Invitation to forge the future 🤝

Once you install Radicle and set up your identity, you’ll have access to all public repositories on any public node, making it easier to explore and contribute to the ecosystem. Compared to traditional self-hosted forges, which often result in fragmented collaboration environments, Radicle represents an evolutionary step for Git-based collaboration, with a single cryptographic identity that works across nodes.

Lastly, in the spirit of free and open source software, we believe that power lies in community. As we embark on further iterating the protocol and stack, we also invite you to shape the future of Radicle with us. Consider joining us on our Zulip instance. Your ideas and insights are invaluable to our mission of creating a sovereign forge.

Together, we can make significant progress towards reclaiming the internet.

Free your code!

👾👾👾

Follow us on 🐘 Mastodon, 🦋 Bluesky or 🐦 Twitter to stay updated.

Contribute to Radicle as a 🌱 seeder, 🧙 developer or by 🪞 mirroring your repositories on the Radicle network.

Join our community on 💬 Zulip and discuss your ideas to improve Radicle.