Installation

  1. Prerequisites
  2. Clone the repository
  3. Verify the toolchain
  4. Install the xr CLI
  5. Next

Prerequisites

  • Rust, installed via rustup. Larust pins an exact compiler version in the repository’s own rust-toolchain.toml - once you have rustup on your machine, running any cargo/xr command from inside a Larust checkout automatically fetches and uses that exact version, so you don’t need to match it by hand.
  • A C++ toolchain, for the same reason any Rust project depending on sqlx-sqlite needs one: the SQLite backend compiles SQLite’s own C source as part of the build.
    • Windows: the “Desktop development with C++” workload from the Visual Studio Build Tools (a full Visual Studio install works too - Larust was built against VS 2022 Community).
    • macOS: Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install).
    • Linux: build-essential (Debian/Ubuntu) or your distribution’s equivalent (gcc, make).
  • Git, to clone the repository - Larust isn’t published to crates.io yet (see below), so git is how you get it and how xr upgrade later keeps it current.
  • Node.js and npm, only if you plan to use a generated app’s optional frontend asset pipeline (Vite/Tailwind) - xr build/xr deploy invoke npm run build themselves, but only when a node_modules/ directory exists at all. Skip this if you don’t need it; nothing else in the framework depends on Node.

If you’re picking this project back up after a fresh OS install, Rust’s own toolchain files often survive under ~/.cargo/~/.rustup even when the shell’s PATH doesn’t - check there before reinstalling from scratch.

Clone the repository 

git clone https://github.com/wallabydesigns/Larust.git
cd Larust

Why a full clone, and not cargo install larust-cli? Larust isn’t published to crates.io (or anywhere else) yet. Every generated app resolves the framework’s own crates - larust-core, larust-http, larust-orm, and so on - as local path dependencies pointing back into this checkout. That means a Larust app has to live inside (or be told how to find) a real clone of this repository; there is no way yet to cargo add larust-support into an arbitrary project the way you would with a published crate. xr new handles finding that checkout for you automatically in the common case (see Your First App).

Verify the toolchain 

cargo build --workspace

The first build compiles every crate in the workspace - around two dozen, including three SQL backends, Axum, and a tree-sitter-based Laravel converter - so it can take several minutes the first time. Every build after that is incremental and fast.

Run the test suite too, if you want real confidence the toolchain and platform-specific pieces (session handling, zero-downtime restarts, path-traversal guards) actually work on your machine before you build on top of them:

cargo test --workspace
cargo clippy --workspace -- -D warnings
cargo fmt --check

Install the xr CLI

xr is Larust’s artisan - the CLI you’ll use for almost everything day to day (scaffolding, migrations, code generation, running the dev server, deploying). It’s a real binary built from this same checkout, installed once via cargo install --path:

./install.sh       # macOS / Linux / Git Bash

.\install.ps1       # Windows PowerShell

Both scripts are thin wrappers around cargo install --path crates/larust-cli that check cargo is on PATH first and give you a clear next step if the install succeeds but ~/.cargo/bin itself isn’t on your PATH yet (a fresh Rust install’s most common rough edge - rustup usually adds it for you, but not always, and never retroactively for a terminal session that was already open).

Confirm it worked:

xr --version

You should see xr 0.1.0 (<commit hash>) - the commit hash, not a semantic version, is what actually tells you how fresh your build is (this workspace’s Cargo.toml version has stayed 0.1.0 through every milestone so far; see FAQ for why). Whenever you pull new changes into your checkout, re-run the install script (or xr upgrade, once you have a first working xr - see the CLI reference) to rebuild it from the new source.

Don’t want xr on PATH at all? Everything it does is also reachable as cargo run -p larust-cli -- <command> from the workspace root - xr is a convenience, not a requirement.

Next

Head to Your First App to scaffold something real.