rea doctor says healthy: false

What you see

rea doctor --json reports "healthy": false with a list of failures: Hopper, Ghidra, IDA, JADX…

The error

{"healthy": false, "scope": {"mode": "audit-wide"}}
{"name": "hopper", "ok": false, "remediation": "Run rea setup to install Hopper, or set HOPPER_LAUNCHER_PATH."}
{"name": "ghidra", "ok": false, "detail": "GHIDRA_INSTALL_DIR is not set", "remediation": "Set GHIDRA_INSTALL_DIR to an extracted Ghidra 12.1.x release directory."}
{"name": "ida-registration", "ok": false, "detail": "IDA MCP registration is not configured.", "remediation": "Set REA_IDA_MCP_CONFIG to your upstream IDA MCP registration JSON; see docs/ida-provider.md."}
{"name": "jadx", "ok": false, "detail": "Set REA_JADX_MCP_JAR to the absolute path of a caller-supplied jadx-headless-mcp 0.7.1 JAR. REA does not download or install it.", "remediation": "…"}
{"name": "skill:identity", "ok": false, "detail": "Installed REA skill identity is missing.", "remediation": "Run rea setup to update the installed REA skill."}

Tested 2026-10-27 on macOS 15.6.1 with REA 6.8.0. Output from a machine with no analysis engines installed.

Why it happens

Without options, doctor audits **every** agent and **every** analysis engine it can find. Engines you don't use, such as an uninstalled Hopper or IDA, count as failures, so healthy can be false even when your setup works. REA's docs say the same.

How to fix it

1. Check only what you use. With a scope, healthy depends only on those checks:

   TerminalCopy

   npx rea-agents doctor --client cursor --json

   TerminalCopy

   npx rea-agents doctor --provider ghidra --json

   TerminalCopy

   npx rea-agents doctor --skill --json

2. Read scope_checks: they decide healthy. informational_checks are for reference and don't change the result.

3. If you do use Ghidra and it reports GHIDRA_INSTALL_DIR is not set, set the paths and check again (see the install guide):

   TerminalCopy

   export GHIDRA_INSTALL_DIR="/absolute/path/to/ghidra_12.1.4_PUBLIC"
   export JAVA_HOME="/absolute/path/to/jdk-21"
   npx rea-agents doctor --provider ghidra --json

4. In Windows PowerShell:

   PowerShellCopy

   $env:GHIDRA_INSTALL_DIR = "C:\path\to\ghidra_12.1.4_PUBLIC"
   $env:JAVA_HOME = "C:\path\to\jdk-21"
   npx rea-agents doctor --provider ghidra --json