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Building Elvish from source

To build Elvish from source, you need

  • A supported OS: Linux, {Free,Net,Open}BSD, macOS, or Windows 10. Windows 10 support is experimental.

  • Go >= 1.21.0.

To build Elvish from source, run one of the following commands:

go install src.elv.sh/cmd/elvish@master # Install latest commit
go install src.elv.sh/cmd/elvish@latest # Install latest released version
go install src.elv.sh/cmd/elvish@v0.18.0 # Install a specific version

Controlling the installation location

The go install command installs Elvish to $GOBIN; the binary name is elvish. You can control the installation location by overriding $GOBIN, for example by prepending env GOBIN=... to the go install command.

If $GOBIN is not set, the installation location defaults to $GOPATH/bin, which in turn defaults to ~/go/bin if $GOPATH is also not set.

The installation directory is probably not in your OS's default $PATH. You should either either add it to $PATH, or manually copy the Elvish binary to a directory already in $PATH.

Building an alternative entrypoint

In additional to src.elv.sh/cmd/elvish (which corresponds to the cmd/elvish directory in the repo), there are a few alternative entrypoints, all named liked cmd/*/elvish, with slightly different feature sets. (From the perspective of Go, these are just different main packages.)

For example, install the cmd/withpprof/elvish entrypoint to get profiling support (change the part after @ to get different versions):

go install src.elv.sh/cmd/withpprof/elvish@master

Building from a local source tree

If you are modifying Elvish's source code, you will want to clone Elvish's Git repository and build Elvish from the local source tree instead. To do this, run the following from the root of the source tree:

go install ./cmd/elvish

There is no need to specify a version like @master; when inside a source tree, go install will always use the whatever source code is present.

See contributing.md for more notes for contributors.

Building with experimental plugin support

Elvish has experimental support for building and importing plugins, modules written in Go. It relies on Go's plugin support, which is only available on a few platforms.

Plugin support requires building Elvish with cgo. The official prebuilt binaries are built without cgo for compatibility and reproducibility, but by default the Go toolchain builds with cgo enabled.

If you have built Elvish from source on a platform with plugin support, your Elvish build probably already supports plugins. To force cgo to be used when building Elvish, you can do the following:

env CGO_ENABLED=1 go install ./cmd/elvish

To build a plugin, see this example.