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.

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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:

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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" and "libssl-dev" package:

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RHEL based distros

You will need to install "libxcb", "openssl-devel" and "libX11-devel":

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macOS

Using Homebrew, you will need to install "openssl" and "cmake" using:

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Build using crates.io

Nu 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:

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That's it! The cargo tool will do the work of downloading Nu and its source dependencies, building it, and installing it into the cargo bin path.

If you want to install with support for dataframes, you can install using the --features=dataframe flag.

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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:

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From there, we can build and run Nu with:

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You can also build and run Nu in release mode, which enables more optimizations:

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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.