Installing Claude Code: the guide for Windows and Mac

Installing Claude Code is a single command and takes under two minutes. It gets interesting afterwards: with the account, which most guides describe incorrectly, with the error messages of the first launch, and with the question of how often a tool that touches code and files in your company may update itself in the background.

English edition of an article from our German magazine. Read the German original

The German original was updated on 12 November 2026, after this English edition. The current version is in German.

One terminal window, one command, done. The effort with Claude Code lies in the decisions before and after. Photo: olia danilevich on Pexels

Account first, then the command

An installation that runs through and then fails at sign-in is the most common avoidable frustration with this tool. So reverse the order.

Claude Code requires a paid account: Pro, Max, Team or Enterprise, or alternatively a Console account that bills by token. The free Claude plan explicitly does not include Claude Code; that is what the setup documentation says, and it matches what we wrote in Using Claude for free (in German). If you go through a cloud provider instead, you use Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud’s Agent Platform or Microsoft Foundry.

For companies, one detail matters that keeps circulating incorrectly on the German-language web: in the Team plan, Claude Code is already part of the standard seat at 20 US dollars on an annual plan. The claim that it needs a premium seat at 100 dollars dates from the launch phase in 2025 and is outdated. What usage actually costs per month, we calculated with the figures from the Anthropic documentation in Claude Code pricing: subscription, API and sample calculations (in German).

The second point before the command: the operating system. The requirements are low, but one number regularly surprises people.

The number that trips people up is macOS 13. Many guides say macOS 11 Big Sur, and that is correct too, just for a different product: the graphical Claude desktop app (in German) runs from macOS 11, the command-line tool only from macOS 13 Ventura. On a MacBook that is still on Monterey, no installation command helps, only a system update.

Mac: one command, two checks

Open Terminal, paste the command, press Enter.

curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

Then change to the folder you want to work in and type claude. On first launch, the browser opens for sign-in. If the environment variable ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is set, Claude Code instead asks once whether this key should be used. How to create such a key and secure it with a spending limit is covered in Creating a Claude API key (in German).

Two checks are worth doing right afterwards:

claude --version
claude doctor

The first command prints a version number, such as 2.1.272 (Claude Code). The second is the underrated one: claude doctor checks the installation and the configuration files without starting a session, reports errors in the settings.json and shows whether the last background update went through. For any later problem, this is the first place to look.

The installer places the binary at ~/.local/bin/claude, as a link to a folder with all installed versions. If you get zsh: command not found: claude at this point, this folder is missing from the search path:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

Windows: native or WSL is the only real decision

Since the native installer, nobody on Windows needs a Linux environment anymore. The command runs in PowerShell and does not require administrator rights:

irm https://claude.ai/install.ps1 | iex

In the CMD command prompt, the same step looks different:

curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.cmd -o install.cmd && install.cmd && del install.cmd

You can tell which of the two consoles is open from the prompt: PowerShell shows PS C:\, CMD only C:\. If you mix up the commands, you get either 'irm' is not recognized or The token '&&' is not a valid statement separator. Neither is a defect, just the wrong clipboard.

That leaves the question of WSL. The documentation answers it with a table whose core comes down to one sentence: sandboxed command execution only exists under WSL 2, not under native Windows or WSL 1. If your developers work in a Linux toolchain, or if you want the tool to run commands in an isolated environment, WSL 2 is the right route. For everything else, the native installation is enough.

Git for Windows is optional, and none of the German-language guides has caught up with this change yet. Without Git, Claude Code uses the PowerShell tool for shell commands; with Git, it uses Git Bash for the Bash tool. Git is useful where you work with Bash scripts. If Claude Code does not find an existing Git, an entry in the settings.json helps:

{
  "env": {
    "CLAUDE_CODE_GIT_BASH_PATH": "C:\\Program Files\\Git\\bin\\bash.exe"
  }
}

A detail on this that can cost hours: at this point Claude Code only accepts files named bash.exe, sh.exe, bash or sh. If you enter the launcher git-bash.exe, you get no error message; the variable is silently ignored.

Homebrew, WinGet, npm and the Linux package repositories

Besides the native installer there are four other routes. The difference lies less in the command than in the question of who takes care of the updates.

With Homebrew there is a subtlety that I have not found in any German-language guide: Anthropic maintains two casks there. claude-code follows the stable channel, claude-code@latest gets every version immediately. If you install the first and later run brew upgrade claude-code@latest, you are updating a package you do not have.

One more correction on npm, because the statement “Node.js 18 or later” appears in almost every German-language guide: since version 2.1.198, the npm package requires Node.js 22. On an older version, the installation still does not abort; npm prints an EBADENGINE warning and claude runs afterwards, because the npm package ships the same native binary as the installer and does not use Node at all at runtime. At this point the documentation explicitly warns against sudo npm install -g, because it creates permission problems and a security risk.

Do NOT use sudo npm install -g as this can lead to permission issues and security risks.

Anthropic, Claude Code Advanced Setup, accessed on 15 September 2026

The question your IT will ask

“Piping a script from the internet straight into the shell?” This question comes up in every company with a serious IT department, and it is justified. The good news: Anthropic provides all three answers an IT department accepts.

First, the package repositories. There are signed repositories for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL and Alpine. The fingerprint of the signing key is 31DD DE24 DDFA B679 F42D 7BD2 BAA9 29FF 1A7E CACE, and it can be checked with gpg --show-keys before setup. After that, the package manager checks every update itself.

Second, the signed manifest. Every release from 2.1.89 on comes with a manifest.json containing SHA256 checksums of all platform binaries, plus a detached GPG signature. If you check the signature of the manifest, you have indirectly checked every file listed in it.

Third, the signatures of the binaries themselves. On macOS, the file is signed by “Anthropic PBC” and notarized by Apple, verifiable with codesign --verify --verbose ./claude. On Windows, it carries an Authenticode signature from “Anthropic, PBC”, verifiable with Get-AuthenticodeSignature .\claude.exe. Linux files carry no signature of their own; there the manifest or the package repository takes on this role.

If you present this in documented form, you usually get approval without a second meeting. How to set up the rest of the Claude rollout on the data protection side is covered in Rolling out Claude in compliance with the GDPR.

The typical errors on first launch

Almost all the messages that appear on the first attempt come down to five causes. The table maps the error texts from the Anthropic documentation directly to the solution.

If more than one installation has piled up over time, which -a claude lists all binaries found on macOS and Linux, and where.exe claude does the same on Windows. The recommended option is the native installation under ~/.local/bin/claude; an old global npm package goes away with npm uninstall -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code.

The update rhythm: 31 versions in 30 days

Now to the point that causes more discussion in a company than the installation itself. Native installations update themselves in the background, and often.

On 15 September 2026, we read out Anthropic’s distribution server and the npm registry. The result: the latest channel showed version 2.1.272, released on 14 September. The stable channel showed 2.1.236 from 19 August. Between them lie 28 versions and 26 days. In the 30 days before this measurement, 31 versions were released, eight of them in the last seven days.

Two things can be read from this. First: Claude Code releases roughly one version per day on average. If you leave your workstations on the default channel, you have a different tool on the machine every week. Second: the documentation describes stable as “typically about a week behind” latest. On the day of our measurement, it was 26 days. That fits the logic of the channel, which skips versions with major regressions, but it contradicts the expectation the wording creates. If you choose stable, plan for a lag of several weeks.

This is controlled through the settings.json:

{
  "autoUpdatesChannel": "stable",
  "minimumVersion": "2.1.236"
}

autoUpdatesChannel selects the channel, and minimumVersion sets a floor: neither a background update nor claude update installs anything below it. That prevents a switch from latest to stable from resetting the workstations to an older version. In the managed settings, requiredMinimumVersion and requiredMaximumVersion come on top; they enforce a version corridor outside of which Claude Code does not start at all. If you want to switch off automatic updates entirely, set DISABLE_AUTOUPDATER to "1"; for all routes including manual updates, use DISABLE_UPDATES.

For most mid-sized companies, stable plus a set floor is the right combination. Teams that are meant to test new features stay on latest. This decision belongs in the same meeting in which you decide which folders the tool may see at all.

What the German-language guides leave open

On 15 September 2026, we checked four German-language guides to installing Claude Code against the Anthropic documentation: gradually.ai (as of 28 May 2026), flowki-club.de (12 August 2026), findskill.ai (4 May 2026) and the German page of kimi.ai (12 August 2026).

The result in numbers: one of the four pages names the correct minimum macOS version 13.0. The same goes for the Windows requirement of build 1809, with another page wrongly naming build 1903. The Node information is outdated or wrong on three of the four pages, and one of them even lists Node.js 18 as a requirement for the native installation, which needs no Node at all. None of the four pages says that Git for Windows is optional. None says that the only verifiable reason for WSL 2 is sandboxed execution either; one page recommends WSL across the board because Claude Code supposedly “works better” with it. The two Homebrew casks and the signed package repositories appear nowhere, and Team, Enterprise and Console are missing from the list of plans that include Claude Code.

The reason lies in the pace: at 31 versions a month, a guide goes out of date within weeks. That is exactly why every statement in this article carries a check date, and exactly why we update this page instead of writing a second one.

The next step after the installation: open a project that contains recurring manual work, such as a folder structure full of quotes or exports, and let Claude Code take on the first task from it. Which tasks suit this, even in teams without developers, is shown in Claude Code for non-programmers (in German); the overview of the whole tool is in our Claude hub.

Florian Wessling

CEO, Collective Brain GmbH · Hamburg

Florian Wessling is CEO of Collective Brain GmbH in Hamburg and has spent more than 15 years bringing brands, content strategy and AI-supported marketing to mid-sized companies and corporations. What Collective Brain sells, he runs himself first: six of the company's own AI brands serve as a test bed, from the automated content pipeline to the daily updated AI Leaderboard. He is a registered BAFA consultant and runs Collective Brain as a Google Partner agency.

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