Installing Rover

The Rover CLI is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Installation Methods

Linux / MacOS installer

To install or upgrade to the latest release of Rover:

1curl -sSL https://rover.apollo.dev/nix/latest | sh

To install or upgrade to a specific version of Rover (recommended for CI environments to ensure predictable behavior):

1# Note the `v` prefixing the version number
2curl -sSL https://rover.apollo.dev/nix/v0.39.1 | sh

If your machine doesn't have the curl command, you can get the latest version from the curl downloads page.

Windows PowerShell installer

To install or upgrade to the latest release of Rover:

1iwr 'https://rover.apollo.dev/win/latest' | iex

To install or upgrade to a specific version of Rover (recommended for CI environments to ensure predictable behavior):

1# Note the `v` prefixing the version number
2iwr 'https://rover.apollo.dev/win/v0.39.1' | iex

Installing from a binary mirror using the bash and PowerShell scripts

Both the bash and powershell scripts support the APOLLO_ROVER_BINARY_DOWNLOAD_PREFIX environment variable, which defaults to https://github.com/apollographql/rover/releases/download.

This can be set in your environment to specify a remote mirror or proxy to a GitHub release download URL for the Apollo Rover GitHub repository.

For example, if your remote host is my-mirror-proxy.com/artifacts/github-com:

• From a bash shell:

1# for bash (Mac/Linux)
2export APOLLO_ROVER_BINARY_DOWNLOAD_PREFIX="https://my-mirror-proxy.com/artifacts/github-com/apollographql/rover/releases/download"

• From a PowerShell:

1# for PowerShell (Windows)
2$env:APOLLO_ROVER_BINARY_DOWNLOAD_PREFIX = "https://my-mirror-proxy.com/artifacts/github-com/apollographql/rover/releases/download"

This variable also supports basic authentication. Set the format of the URL to https://<username>:<password>@<remote-host>/apollographql/rover/releases/download

Docker image

Starting with Rover v0.39.1, Apollo publishes a Linux container image with each release. The image's default entry point is rover, so any arguments you pass to docker run are forwarded to the CLI. Each version tag is enforced as immutable, so a pinned tag can't change transparently.

Pull from either GitHub Container Registry or Docker Hub:

1docker pull ghcr.io/apollographql/rover:0.39.1
2# or
3docker pull apollograph/rover:0.39.1

Then run any Rover command:

1docker run --rm \
2  -e APOLLO_KEY \
3  -v "$PWD:/workspace" -w /workspace \
4  ghcr.io/apollographql/rover:0.39.1 \
5  subgraph check my-graph@prod --name products --schema ./schema.graphql

This is the recommended way to run Rover in CI on providers that support running steps inside a container image (CircleCI, Bitbucket Pipelines, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins with a Docker agent, and so on). See the CI/CD guide for end-to-end examples.

npm installer

Rover is distributed on npm for integration with your JavaScript projects. Rover's Node dependency follows LTS versions where possible unless security concerns justify an earlier upgrade.

Installing from a binary mirror

Internally, the npm installer downloads router binaries from https://rover.apollo.dev. If this URL is unavailable, for example, in a private network, you can point the npm installer at another URL in one of two ways:

1. Setting the APOLLO_ROVER_DOWNLOAD_HOST environment variable.

   note

   This environment variable also changes the host that plugins for rover supergraph compose and rover dev are downloaded from. By default, rover dev attempts to install the latest version of plugins for the router, composition, and MCP server. To maintain this behavior, an X-Version: vX.X.X header must be present in the response from the binary mirror. To circumvent the need for this header, plugin versions can instead be pinned with the APOLLO_ROVER_DEV_COMPOSITION_VERSION, APOLLO_ROVER_DEV_ROUTER_VERSION, and APOLLO_ROVER_DEV_MCP_VERSION environment variables. For more details, see versioning for rover dev.

2. Adding the following to your global or local .npmrc:

1apollo_rover_download_host=https://your.mirror.com/repository

devDependencies install

Run the following to install rover as one of your project's devDependencies:

1npm install --save-dev @apollo/rover

You can then call rover <parameters> directly in your package.json scripts, or you can run npx -p @apollo/rover rover <parameters> in your project directory to execute commands.

Global install

To install rover globally so you can use it from any directory on your machine, run the following:

1npm install -g @apollo/rover

Binary download

You can also download the Rover binary for your operating system and manually add its location to your PATH.

Unofficial methods

There are a few additional installation methods maintained by the community:

1. Homebrew

2. Nix

Next steps

After installing Rover, you can set up shell completion for bash or zsh to enable tab completion for Rover commands. See the completion command documentation for instructions.

Connecting to GraphOS

After you install Rover, you should authenticate it with GraphOS, because many of its commands communicate with GraphOS.

Run the following command:

1rover config auth

This command instructs you where to obtain a personal API key and helps you set up a configuration profile. For more information, see Configuring Rover.