Requirements & Limits

jarvis is deliberately narrow: check your language and platform here before you install.

Language	Navigation	Search	Caveat
TypeScript / TSX	Yes	Yes	—
Python	Yes	Yes	—
Java / Kotlin	Yes	Yes	Android/Gradle, Kotlin version, Maven on macOS
Swift	Yes	Yes	Version floor + code-signed targets
Go	No	Yes	—
Ruby	No	Yes	—
Rust	No	Yes	—
C	No	Yes	—
C++	No	Yes	—
C#	No	Yes	—
PHP	No	Yes	—
Scala	No	Yes	—
shell	No	Yes	—
SQL	No	Yes	—

Navigation tools (goToDefinition, findReferences, callHierarchy, typeHierarchy, documentSymbols) cover only the four families above. Every other git-tracked language is indexed --search-only: searchCode and semanticSearch work, navigation does not.

Platform requirements

• macOS and Linux only. Windows is not supported.
• Python 3.12+, installed via uv (the quickstart pins --python 3.13 so uv tool install always resolves the current jarvis-mcp).
• git — language detection and Zoekt indexing both read the git-tracked tree.
• Node.js with npm (LTS) — required to install the TypeScript and Python indexers (scip-typescript, scip-python are npm packages). Without it, setup.sh skips both with a warning and those languages get search-only coverage.

setup.sh installs these external binaries:

Purpose	Binary	Source
SCIP → SQLite conversion	scip	prebuilt, pinned v0.9.0 (minimum — older versions silently drop occurrence ranges)
Lexical search	zoekt-git-index · zoekt-webserver	cross-compiled by jarvis’s CI — upstream publishes no binaries
TypeScript indexing	scip-typescript	npm install -g
Python indexing	scip-python	npm install -g
Swift indexing	scip-swift	prebuilt, macOS arm64 only
Java/Kotlin indexing	scip-java	detect-only — Docker image, asks before pulling

Language caveats

Swift: version floor and code-signed targets

Swift indexing requires scip >= v0.9.0 — older converters cannot read scip.proto’s typed_range oneof, the only range encoding scip-swift emits, and silently produce an index with no navigable positions. jarvis index refuses an older scip rather than publishing one.

Repos with code-signed app-extension targets additionally require scip-swift >= v0.1.2; earlier versions pass no code-signing overrides to xcodebuild, which then fails provisioning before compiling anything. setup.sh skips any dependency that is merely present, so an existing install is not upgraded automatically — run sh ./setup.sh --only scip-swift --force.

Android/Gradle: no SCIP support (auto-degrades to search-only)

Caution

scip-java can’t index Android/Gradle repos at all — its Gradle plugin keys off Gradle’s standard source sets, which AGP replaces with its own variant model, so the build emits zero SCIP shards. jarvis detects this automatically from the indexer’s own failure output and degrades to --search-only: navigation tools return empty, searchCode and semanticSearch still work. This is a settled limitation, not a bug.

Kotlin: exact version match required (auto-degrades to search-only)

Caution

scip-kotlinc is compiled against one pinned Kotlin release; its compiler-plugin API is internal and unstable even across patch releases, so any other version fails. jarvis detects the failure and degrades to --search-only the same way as the Android/Gradle case above.

Java (Maven) on macOS: requires bash >= 4.4

scip-java’s generated javac wrapper expands an unguarded array reference that errors on bash < 4.4; macOS ships only 3.2, so a Maven build dies at default-compile rather than degrading to search-only. setup.sh works around it by shimming a newer bash onto PATH for the indexer. If no bash >= 4.4 is available, indexing fails with the remedy (brew install bash) instead of silently falling back — unlike the two cases above, a persisted --search-only cannot be un-set, so this one stops short rather than choosing for you.

semanticSearch: requires the semantic extra

semanticSearch is not installed by default. It requires uv tool install "jarvis-mcp[semantic]" and a re-index of each repo (jarvis reindex <slug>). Without the extra the tool returns its unavailable-reason payload.

Language detection: one language per repo

Language is detected by extension plurality across git-tracked files only — a polyglot monorepo is indexed as whichever language has the most files. Multi-language merge is out of scope. --language overrides the detected choice; once set, only re-running jarvis index with a new value changes it.