Installation¶

Spine ships as a single package, spinekit, with a lean core and opt-in extras. The import name stays spine_core (etc.).

# the kernel — only Pydantic + anyio
pip install spinekit            # or: uv add spinekit

The full Spine code is installed (it's small); the heavy dependencies are extras, so your project pulls only what it uses.

Extras¶

pip install "spinekit[openai]"            # OpenAI provider
pip install "spinekit[anthropic]"         # Anthropic provider
pip install "spinekit[providers]"         # both
pip install "spinekit[cli]"               # the spine CLI (Typer + Rich)
pip install "spinekit[redis]"             # Redis checkpoint
pip install "spinekit[postgres]"          # Postgres / pgvector
pip install "spinekit[mcp]"               # MCP tools
pip install "spinekit[a2a]"               # remote agents (A2A)
pip install "spinekit[otel]"              # OpenTelemetry  (+[otlp] for the exporter)
pip install "spinekit[eval]"              # the eval harness (YAML datasets)
pip install "spinekit[all]"               # everything

Combine them: pip install "spinekit[openai,redis,cli]".

Extra	Pulls	For
`openai` / `anthropic` / `providers`	the provider SDK(s)	native models
`cli`	typer, rich	the `spine` command
`redis` / `postgres`	redis / asyncpg	distributed checkpoints, pgvector
`mcp` / `a2a`	mcp / httpx	MCP tools, remote agents
`otel` / `otlp`	opentelemetry	observability
`eval`	pyyaml	YAML eval datasets
`all`	all of the above	kitchen sink

What's always there

spine_core, spine_middleware, spine_backends (SQLite + in-memory), spine_orchestration need no extra — their code ships with the base install and depends only on the standard library + Pydantic + anyio.

Requirements¶

Python 3.12+
Base install pulls only Pydantic v2 and anyio.

Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint¶

No extra beyond [openai] — point the client at a base_url (Ollama, vLLM, Groq, …). See Models & any provider.

Scaffold a project¶

pip install "spinekit[cli]"
spine init my-agent
cd my-agent && spine doctor

See the CLI reference for the generated layout.