Installing Nu
There are lots of ways to get Nu up and running. You can download pre-built binaries from our release page, use your favourite package manager, or build from source.
The main Nushell binary is named nu
(or nu.exe
on Windows). After installation, you can launch it by typing nu
.
$ nu
/home/sophiajt/Source>
Pre-built Binaries
Nu binaries are published for Linux, macOS, and Windows with each GitHub release. Just download, extract the binaries, then copy them to a location on your PATH.
Package Managers
Nu is available via several package managers:
For macOS and Linux, Homebrew is a popular choice (brew install nushell
).
For Windows:
- Winget (
winget install nushell
) - Chocolatey (
choco install nushell
) - Scoop (
scoop install nu
)
Cross Platform installation:
- npm (
npm install -g nushell
Note that nu plugins are not included if you install in this way)
Build from Source
You can also build Nu from source. First, you will need to set up the Rust toolchain and its dependencies.
Installing a Compiler Suite
For Rust to work properly, you'll need to have a compatible compiler suite installed on your system. These are the recommended compiler suites:
- Linux: GCC or Clang
- macOS: Clang (install Xcode)
- Windows: MSVC (install Visual Studio or the Visual Studio Build Tools)
- Make sure to install the "Desktop development with C++" workload
- Any Visual Studio edition will work (Community is free)
Installing Rust
If you don't already have Rust on our system, the best way to install it is via rustup. Rustup is a way of managing Rust installations, including managing using different Rust versions.
Nu currently requires the latest stable (1.66.1 or later) version of Rust. The best way is to let rustup
find the correct version for you. When you first open rustup
it will ask what version of Rust you wish to install:
Current installation options:
default host triple: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
default toolchain: stable
profile: default
modify PATH variable: yes
1) Proceed with installation (default)
2) Customize installation
3) Cancel installation
Once you are ready, press 1 and then enter.
If you'd rather not install Rust via rustup
, you can also install it via other methods (e.g. from a package in a Linux distro). Just be sure to install a version of Rust that is 1.66.1 or later.
Dependencies
Debian/Ubuntu
You will need to install the "pkg-config", "build-essential" and "libssl-dev" packages:
apt install pkg-config libssl-dev build-essential
RHEL based distros
You will need to install "libxcb", "openssl-devel" and "libX11-devel":
yum install libxcb openssl-devel libX11-devel
macOS
Using Homebrew, you will need to install "openssl" and "cmake" using:
brew install openssl cmake
Build from crates.io using Cargo
Nushell releases are published as source to the popular Rust package registry crates.io. This makes it easy to build and install the latest Nu release with cargo
:
cargo install nu
The cargo
tool will do the work of downloading Nu and its source dependencies, building it, and installing it into the cargo bin path.
Note that the default plugins must be installed separately when using cargo
. See the Plugins Installation section of the Book for instructions.
Building from the GitHub repository
You can also build Nu from the latest source on GitHub. This gives you immediate access to the latest features and bug fixes. First, clone the repo:
> git clone https://github.com/nushell/nushell.git
From there, we can build and run Nu with:
> cd nushell
nushell> cargo build --workspace; cargo run
You can also build and run Nu in release mode, which enables more optimizations:
nushell> cargo build --release --workspace; cargo run --release
People familiar with Rust may wonder why we do both a "build" and a "run" step if "run" does a build by default. This is to get around a shortcoming of the new default-run
option in Cargo, and ensure that all plugins are built, though this may not be required in the future.