Installation

Reflex is a local-first code search engine that combines trigram indexing for full-text search with Tree-sitter parsing for symbol extraction and static analysis for dependency tracking. Unlike symbol-only tools, Reflex finds every occurrence of a pattern with deterministic, repeatable results.

Install

Choose your preferred package manager:

# npm (recommended — includes prebuilt binaries)
npm install -g reflex-search

# cargo (builds from source, requires Rust toolchain)
cargo install reflex-search

Verify the installation

rfx --version

You should see output like reflex-search 1.1.1.

Project setup

Navigate to your project root and run:

rfx index

This creates a .reflex/ directory containing the search index. Add it to your .gitignore:

echo '.reflex/' >> .gitignore

That’s it — Reflex is ready. The index is fully local; no data leaves your machine.

What’s inside .reflex/

File	Purpose
meta.db	SQLite metadata (file list, stats, config)
trigrams.bin	Trigram inverted index for fast full-text search
content.bin	Memory-mapped file contents for result display
config.toml	Project-level configuration

System requirements

• Node.js 18+ (for npm install) or Rust 1.75+ (for cargo install)
• Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows
• No external services or network access required

Next steps

Head to the Quick Start to index your first project and run queries, or see Configuration to customize Reflex for your workflow.