Install and open a project

Rho is a local service with a WebUI. It runs on your machine, in a folder you choose, and it talks to an Agent client you already have. Nothing is sent to a Rho server, because there is no Rho server.

Requirements

Requirement	What Rho needs
Node	>=22.22.0 <27: the 22, 24 and 26 LTS lines. The checked baseline is Node 22.22.3 with npm 10.9.8; the test suite and the installed check also passed on 24.22.2 and 26.13.0.
R	Only for R work. The service, documents, readers and saved results work without R; a missing Rscript reports an unknown dependency probe instead of pretending.
R packages	Yours to install. Rho does not install project packages implicitly.
Agent client	Rho's Agent panel drives your own Claude Code or Codex. DeepSeek Harness can connect as an external Agent through the dsh-rho plugin.
Python	Only for the file writer lock on platforms that need it. Windows does not.

macOS arm64 is the checked baseline. Windows x64 was checked with Node 22.23.4 and Rscript 4.5.1; Linux x64 and arm64 carry platform installs. On macOS x64 the application starts only under Rosetta.

Or ask your Agent

Paste this into Claude Code or Codex:

Read https://yulab-smu.top/Rho/doc/setup.md and follow its steps to install and configure Rho for me.

The setup page holds every command, so you can read it first. Your Agent checks the requirements above and looks for a Rho that is already there, then installs the package, starts Rho on ~/Rho/projects and ~/Rho/state, adds the Rho Skill to its own skills folder, connects itself to the example project and tells you what is missing.

Install from npm

npm install -g @rho-workspace/rho

If the global prefix belongs to root, this fails with EACCES; installing it with sudo was performed and worked. The package declares its Node range, so a Node outside it prints one EBADENGINE warning rather than failing silently.

Start the service

rho

From 0.5.4, rho with no arguments uses ~/Rho/projects and ~/Rho/state. It creates both, copies the example project into a new state, and prints the address to open, the two folders and whether your Agent client and R were found. 0.5.3 prints its usage instead. To choose the folders yourself, on any version:

rho --root /absolute/projects --state-dir /absolute/service-state

Create the projects directory first. Keep service state outside it, so a project stays an ordinary folder. Startup prints the loopback URL and the location of the connection file — never the credential. Opening that URL in a browser on the same machine is the access: a same-origin request from loopback is answered as the local person, with no link, no code and no expiry.

A one-time link is available when a tab must be narrower or must expire:

rho --pair

That link is a credential with a five-minute window and a single use.

Open the example project

A new state copies the bundled example/pa14-qs project into your projects folder once, as an ordinary editable project. Open it, then ask the Agent a question about one of its figures or a selected row of a result table.

Use DeepSeek Harness

The dsh-rho plugin connects Harness to an existing Rho project. Its Rho tab and sidebar entry open the complete Rho in Harness Desktop's Browser pane; Web Harness uses a separate browser window. Analyse in the shared Notebook, inspect a result in Rho, then copy a selected-row question back to the same Harness conversation. The guide covers the public prebuilt 0.1.4 Git package and Rho's own market index, matching the conversation's project grant, installation, upgrading the old configuration and connection recovery.

What to read next

• Headless backend — HTTP, SSE, Agent adapters, persistence and budgets.
• Architecture — which repository owns what.
• Status — what has been checked, what is limited, and what remains open.
• Troubleshooting by evidence — the CI episode records the install failures that were actually hit, with the fix that worked.