Package manager installs
If you installed floe via a package manager, use the standard upgrade command for that tool. A binary built from source is checked first and stops withCannot update a dev build. whatever
its path, so the rest of this section applies only to release builds.
floe update detects a package-managed install from the binary’s path and stops with a message
pointing you at the right command, rather than replacing the binary behind your package
manager’s back. The same guard applies to floe update --check.
Detection is a substring match for
homebrew, cellar, linuxbrew, scoop, or winget
anywhere in the binary’s path, so a script install that happens to live under a directory
containing one of those words is treated as package-managed too.
This page is about the floe command-line tool only. Floe Desktop updates on its own track: the
Microsoft Store build updates itself, and the GitHub .exe and .zip builds (0.2.3 and later)
show a daily notice but never install anything, so you download and run the current build again.
floe update never touches the desktop app. Desktop builds ship on their own desktop-v* tags as
GitHub pre-releases, so neither floe update nor the install scripts ever pick them up. See
Update Floe Desktop.
Script and manual installs
Run the built-in update command:Terminal
/usr/local/bin (the
install script’s default), the final swap needs elevation, so floe asks for your sudo password
once. Everything before that step (download, checksum, extraction) runs as your normal user. If
sudo is not installed, the update stops and tells you to re-run as root or reinstall with the
install script. On Windows no elevation is involved: floe renames the running executable aside
and moves the new one into place.
To check for an update without installing:
Terminal
Terminal
The update hint
When a newer release exists,floe version prints an extra line:
Output
floe version runs this check automatically, never send or receive. The result is
cached for 24 hours in floe/update-check.json inside your user config directory (~/.config
on Linux, ~/Library/Application Support on macOS, %AppData% on Windows), so deleting that
file forces a fresh check. floe update --check is a separate, deliberate check: it asks GitHub
directly and ignores the cache.
Set FLOE_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1 to suppress the hint entirely. Binaries compiled from source never
check.