baseRT

Quickstart

1. Install

curl -LsSf https://basecompute.co/install.sh | sh

This installs the prebuilt engine for your platform and the basert CLI to ~/.basert and adds it to your PATH. Restart your shell afterward (or export PATH="$HOME/.basert:$PATH"). See Installation for building from source.

2. Pull a model

basert pull Qwen/Qwen3-4B    # download from HuggingFace + convert to .base
basert list                  # show installed models

Models are cached under ~/.cache/baseRT/models (override with $BASERT_MODELS_DIR). To pick a specific quant build, append :default-q8 to the id (or pass --variant default-q8).

3. Chat

basert chat Qwen/Qwen3-4B

4. Serve an OpenAI-compatible API

basert serve Qwen/Qwen3-4B --api-key "$(uuidgen)" --port 8080

curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"Qwen/Qwen3-4B","messages":[{"role":"user","content":"Hello!"}]}'

5. Or call it from your language

import baseRT

model = baseRT.Model("models/your-model.base")
print(model.generate_text("The capital of France is", max_tokens=64))

Node, Rust, and Swift bindings work the same way — see Bindings.

Use it as a coding agent

BaseRT runs as a local backend for the pi coding agent through the pi-basert extension, which auto-discovers whatever models your server is running.

# 1. Serve a model (a dense model is best for tool calling)
basert serve basecompute/gemma-4-E2B-it

# 2. Install the extension and launch pi
pi install git:github.com/basecompute/pi-basert
pi

Inside pi, run /model to pick a served model. See the pi-basert README for details.

The basert CLI

basert is a single front-end. Model-management commands run natively; runtime commands are forwarded to the matching basert-<cmd> engine binary.

Full flag reference: CLI reference.

What's in this repo

This repository — the CLI, .base format, public headers, and bindings — is licensed under Apache-2.0. The engine ships as a separate prebuilt binary under its own license; see Engine releases.

Links

• Documentation · Server API · .base format
• Security policy · Contributing

License

Apache-2.0 — see LICENSE and NOTICE. The prebuilt engine binary distributed via Releases is proprietary and ships under its own license.