OpenAI’s current official installation instructions for the Codex CLI recommend using npm to install the agent on Linux. This is painless if you’re already using npm, but if you’re not, this introduces a ridiculous amount of dependency bloat for a tool that doesn’t actually depend on Node.js.

The solution to this problem, as referenced in the README from the official GitHub repository, is to manually install the agent. OpenAI is shipping prebuilt binaries for a bunch of different platforms, so for a modern, mainstream Linux distribution this is as simple as downloading and extracting the correct .tar.gz file from GitHub.

Sample Installation Script

Since the official documentation for this installation method isn’t particularly detailed, and since the Codex CLI doesn’t seem to have a built-in update mechanism at the moment, I wrote a simple, proof-of-concept Bash script to automate the process of manually installing and updating the Codex CLI:

#!/bin/bash
set -x
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
wget -q https://github.com/openai/codex/releases/latest/download/codex-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
tar -xzf codex-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
mv codex-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl ~/.local/bin/codex
rm codex-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz

If demand for this installation method increases on our end, I may go back and add some useful features to this script, such as:

  1. Support for different CPU architectures, since OpenAI is currently providing binaries for both x86_64 and aarch64 systems.
  2. Automatic selection of musl versus gnu binaries based on platform support, instead of defaulting to musl.
  3. Automatic creation of a download directoy with mktemp, instead of downloading to the current working directory.
  4. A sanity check to make sure ~/.local/bin is in $PATH and/or a fallback to ~/bin as a backup option.

Closing Thoughts

I’m surprised OpenAI doesn’t already provide an official installation script for the Codex CLI, but I assume they will in the future. In contrast, Anthropic recommends their script-based “native install” method for Claude Code by default, and have already deprecated their npm installation method.