Installation¶

Install from PyPI¶

The easiest way to install Alignmenter is from PyPI:

pip install alignmenter

Install from Source¶

For development or to get the latest features:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/justinGrosvenor/alignmenter.git
cd alignmenter

# Create virtual environment
python -m venv env
source env/bin/activate  # On Windows: env\Scripts\activate

# Install the CLI
pip install -e .

Optional Dependencies¶

Safety Classifier¶

For offline safety checking without API calls:

pip install alignmenter[safety]

This installs the distilled-safety-roberta model for local safety classification.

Model Download

The safety model (~82MB) downloads automatically on first use from Hugging Face Hub.

First run: 10-30 seconds
Subsequent runs: Instant (cached locally)

For CI/CD pipelines, see the Safety Guide for caching instructions to avoid re-downloading on every build.

Development Tools¶

For contributing or running tests:

pip install alignmenter[dev]

This includes pytest, ruff, black, and other development tools.

All Dependencies¶

To install everything:

pip install alignmenter[dev,safety]

Verify Installation¶

Check that Alignmenter is installed correctly:

alignmenter --version

You should see output like:

alignmenter version 0.3.0

Set API Keys¶

Alignmenter needs an OpenAI API key for embeddings (used in authenticity scoring):

export OPENAI_API_KEY="your-key-here"

For Anthropic models:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY="your-key-here"

Tip

Add these to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc to make them permanent.

Initialize Project¶

Create a new Alignmenter project:

alignmenter init

This creates: - configs/ - Configuration files and persona definitions - datasets/ - Sample conversation data - reports/ - Output directory for test results

Next Steps¶

Now that you have Alignmenter installed, check out the Quick Start Guide to run your first test.