Installing Gemini

00:00 Before you can start Gemini CLI, you need to install it on your system. And in order to install it on your system, you need Node.js. The reason for this is that Gemini CLI is primarily implemented in TypeScript, which requires Node.js.

00:16 So go into your terminal and type node --version to check if you have Node.js installed on your system, and the Node.js version must be higher than version 20.

00:30 If you don’t have Node.js installed on your system, on macOS or Linux, you can also use Homebrew to install Gemini CLI. You can find the installation instructions below this video with a link, and there is also a link that guides you to the Node.js download page if you need to install it.

00:50 Once you have verified that you have Node.js installed on your system, you can go ahead and install the Gemini CLI npm package. npm is kind of like PyPI for Python, just in the JavaScript world.

01:04 So the command might be familiar but also a little bit different.

01:09 To install Gemini CLI globally on your system, you type npm install -g @google /gemini-cli. Once you press Enter, npm grabs the package and installs it on your system, and the -g flag for global means that you will be able to access the Gemini CLI from anywhere on your system.

01:34 After the installation completes, you can type gemini --version to check if Gemini was successfully installed on your system. For me, the version currently is 0.13.0, but since AI is a fast-moving target, probably when you’re watching this video course, your version is a bit higher already.

01:55 Still, the general functionality of Gemini won’t change that much. If there is something in this video course that doesn’t work for you, just let us know in the comments below, and we’ll try to help you out.

02:06 And now that Gemini is installed, you’ve verified this by checking the version number, you need to authenticate with a Google account. Let’s do this in the next lesson.