Install

Echo installs as a Claude Code plugin. Before you install it, make sure the tools its workers depend on are present and authenticated — /echo:setup’s preflight check verifies all of this for you, but installing them first means preflight passes on the first try.

Prerequisites

Echo’s hub session and its detached workers shell out to these tools directly:

Tool	Why Echo needs it	Minimum
claude (Claude Code)	The plugin host, and each detached worker is a claude process.	—
gh (GitHub CLI)	Reading and writing the Projects v2 board, issues, and PRs.	authenticated
jq	JSON handling throughout every Echo script.	>= 1.6
git	Per-worker git worktrees and branch management.	>= 2.30

gh must be authenticated — and the auth must be usable with tokens scrubbed

Workers run with GH_TOKEN / GITHUB_TOKEN scrubbed from their environment, so they rely entirely on the gh CLI’s own stored login. Run gh auth login on the machine that hosts Echo (not just an env var). If the board is user-owned rather than org-owned, the token additionally needs the project OAuth scope — grant it with:

gh auth refresh -s project

If gh isn’t authenticated in the scrubbed environment, the dispatcher routes the item to Needs Human instead of spawning a worker that can’t reach GitHub.

What preflight checks

When you run /echo:setup, its preflight step accumulates a full punch-list of problems in one pass (it never stops at the first failure). It verifies exactly:

• gh is installed and gh auth status succeeds
• read access to your repo (gh repo view <owner/repo>)
• the GitHub Projects v2 API is reachable for your token — for a user-owned board the error specifically names the project scope
• jq >= 1.6
• git >= 2.30

Each failure prints as an ERROR: <what> — <how to fix> line, so you can resolve everything before provisioning anything.

Install the plugin

Echo currently ships from a local marketplace — you add the echo-code checkout as a marketplace, then install the echo plugin from it.

1. Add the marketplace — point Claude Code at your local echo-code checkout:

   claude plugin marketplace add ~/projects/echo-code

2. Install the plugin:

   claude plugin install echo@echo-code

3. Confirm the commands are available. Inside Claude Code you should now have the three Echo slash commands:

   • /echo:setup — onboard a repo (run once per project)
   • /echo:tick — run one hub sweep
   • /echo:status — show every registered project and its state

Note

The local marketplace is the current distribution path. Publishing Echo to a public marketplace is a documentation task for later, not a change to how you install it today.

Next step

With the prerequisites in place and the plugin installed, onboard your first repository: Set up a project →.