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)

Docker Container Images

Docker images are available from the GitHub Container Registry. An image for the latest release is built regularly for Alpine and Debian. You can run the image in interactive mode using:

docker run -it --rm ghcr.io/nushell/nushell:<version>-<distro>

Where <version> is the version of Nushell you want to run and <distro> is alpine or the latest supported Debian release, such as bookworm.

To run a specific command, use:

docker run --rm ghcr.io/nushell/nushell:latest-alpine -c "ls /usr/bin | where size > 10KiB"

To run a script from the current directory using Bash, use:

docker run --rm \
    -v $(pwd):/work \
    ghcr.io/nushell/nushell:latest-alpine \
    "/work/script.nu"

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 --locked

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.