Install exercism with Homebrew, apk, dnf, MacPorts, Nix, scoop, winget

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository

Commands and aliases

• exercism

Project history

Exercism was first created in 2013 by Katrina Owen as a tool for her students. The project's own v3 materials describe v1 as a collection of practice exercises, v2 as a free code-mentorship platform, and v3 as the next major platform generation.

Exercism v3 launched on September 1, 2021 after about two years of work. The launch migrated data from v2, changed mentoring from an automatic request to a deliberate user action, and marked a broader redesign of the platform's learning model.

At the same time, Exercism moved from exercism.io to exercism.org after roughly eight years on the old domain. The project framed the move as a better fit for its not-for-profit mission and a more trustworthy home for a growing learning platform.

Adoption history

Exercism's adoption comes from the platform rather than the CLI alone: the official about page describes programming practice and mentorship across 83 languages, and the CLI repository has a long-lived release stream with prebuilt binaries. Package managers carry the CLI because local solving is a normal Exercism workflow, not a fringe integration.

The CLI itself is a Go binary with no additional runtime requirements, which made it easy for Homebrew, Linux distributions, Windows package managers, and language learners to install without pulling in a language-specific toolchain.

How it is used

The core workflow is configure, download, solve, submit. Users configure the CLI with an Exercism API token, download a track exercise by slug, work locally with the track's tests and tooling, and submit implementation files when the solution is ready.

The CLI also handles routine support tasks: checking the installed version, finding the binary with which exercism, opening issue-tracker context through troubleshoot output, and showing command help for less common operations.

Why package nerds care

For package maintainers, exercism is a nice example of a service-backed developer tool whose value is in a stable command-line contract rather than a local compiler or language runtime. It is tiny, cross-platform, frequently released, and directly tied to a public learning service.

For developers, the CLI keeps Exercism from being only a browser exercise site. It lets people use their editor, shell, local tests, and normal version-control habits while still participating in the hosted mentorship and solution-sharing platform.

Timeline

• 2013: Katrina Owen creates Exercism as a tool for her students.
• 2018: Exercism v2 era centers the platform on free code mentorship.
• 2021-09-01: Exercism v3 launches.
• 2021-09-01: Exercism moves from exercism.io to exercism.org.
• 2025-09-24: exercism/cli publishes v3.5.8 on GitHub.

Related projects

• The CLI is part of the broader Exercism platform, including language track repositories, mentoring tools, the exercism.org website, and the platform's GitHub-hosted open-source infrastructure.

Sources

• https://exercism.org/blog/whats-new-in-v3-with-angelika
• https://exercism.org/blog/exercism-v3-has-launched
• https://exercism.org/blog/exercism-io-is-now-exercism-org
• https://exercism.org/about
• https://exercism.org/docs/using/solving-exercises/working-locally
• https://github.com/exercism/cli
• https://github.com/exercism/cli/releases