Prerelease Builds

If you're comfortable with running prerelease software, you can help test the latest features and get the most recent bug fixes by running prerelease builds of Rustty. This helps the project significantly by providing feedback on new features and addressing possible issues before they are released to the public.

An overview of how to install prerelease builds is provided below with more details in the sections following the table.

Platform	Description
macOS	auto-update-channel to get the latest prerelease builds
NixOS/Nix on other distros	Flake within the Rustty repository
Other platforms	Build from source

For macOS, the Rustty project provides signed and notarized builds for the latest commit on the main branch. These are available via GitHub Releases but also via the standard macOS auto-update mechanism.

If you are on a release build, you can switch to the prerelease channel by setting auto-update-channel to tip.

auto-update-channel = tip

Tip

Don't forget to restart Rustty after changing the auto-update-channel setting! This setting does not take effect until Rustty is restarted.

Warning

While you can set this setting back to stable at any time, this will only take effect when a later stable release is available. If you want to downgrade back to the previous stable release, you must re-download Rustty.

Note

Why is this setting called "tip"? The term "tip" is a common term to refer to the latest commit on a branch in Git. Since we build prerelease builds from the latest commit on the main branch, we use the term "tip" to refer to the latest prerelease build rather than something like "nightly".

The Rustty repository comes with a Flake that can be used to build, run and install development ("tip") versions of Rustty reproducibly, which is directly used, tested and maintained by Rustty maintainers as our primary development and CI environment.

# Build and run the latest tip version of Rustty without installing
nix run github:AirelyDev/rustty

Note

The Flake only provides the rustty package on Linux. On macOS the Flake provides only the headless librustty-vt library; build the app with the macOS instructions instead.

NixOS users can install Rustty either directly as a package under packages.<system>.default (where <system> is your current host system, e.g. x86_64-linux), or use the overlay at overlays.default.

{
  pkgs,
  inputs,
}:
{
  # Installing the package directly
  users.users.somebody.packages = [
    inputs.rustty.packages.${pkgs.stdenv.hostPlatform.system}.default
  ];

  # Alternatively, using overlays:
  nixpkgs.overlays = [
    inputs.rustty.overlays.default
  ];
  users.users.somebody.packages = [
    pkgs.rustty
  ];
}

The Flake also exposes Rustty compiled under different optimization settings, including rustty-debug, rustty-releasefast and rustty-releasesafe: releasefast is the default; debug enables better debug information at the cost of performance; and releasesafe is rarely used.

debug and releasefast are also available as overlays, under overlays.debug and overlays.releasefast respectively.