Installation

Inko's native code compiler is written in Rust and uses LLVM as its backend. The generated machine code links against a small runtime library, also written in Rust.

This guide covers the steps needed to get Inko installed on your platform of choice.

Supported platforms

Inko supports Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD (13.2 or newer). Inko might also work on other platforms, but we only provide support for the listed platforms.

Inko historically also supported Windows, but we dropped support with the introduction of the native code compiler. Our knowledge of Windows is limited, and the cost of maintaining Windows support isn't worth it. In the future we may support Windows again, providing somebody is willing to maintain the necessary changes.

Requirements

• A 64-bits little-endian platform
• Rust 1.68 or newer
• LLVM 15, with support for static linking against LLVM
• A C compiler such as GCC or clang
• Git, for managing Inko packages

lld is an optional dependency of Inko, and is used automatically on Linux when available.

Installing

Cross-platform

The easiest way to install Inko is to use Inko's own version manager: ivm. ivm supports all the platforms officially supported by Inko.

Info

Don't forget to install the necessary dependencies using your system's package manager, as ivm doesn't do this for you. You can find the list of the necessary packages to install below.

Once ivm is installed, you can install Inko as follows:

ivm install latest

This installs the latest known version. If you want to install a specific version, run the following instead (where X.Y.Z is the version you want to install):

ivm install X.Y.Z

For more details on how to use ivm and switch versions, refer to the ivm guide.

From source

When building from Git, first clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/inko-lang/inko.git
cd inko

Or use a release tarball:

mkdir 0.11.0
curl https://releases.inko-lang.org/0.11.0.tar.gz -o 0.11.0.tar.gz
tar -C 0.11.0 -xf 0.11.0.tar.gz
cd 0.11.0

You can then compile Inko as follows:

Mode	Command	Executable	Runtime library
Debug	cargo build	./target/debug/inko	./target/debug/libinko.a
Release	cargo build --release	./target/release/inko	./target/release/libinko.a

In both cases the standard library in std/src is used. You can customise the standard library and runtime library paths by setting these environment variables when running cargo build:

• INKO_STD: the full path to the directory containing the standard library modules, defaults to ./std/src.
• INKO_RT: the full path to the directory containing the runtime libraries to link the generated code against, defaults to ./target/MODE where MODE is either debug for debug builds or release for release builds.

If you are building a package, it's recommended to use the provided Makefile instead, as this simplifies the process of moving the necessary files in place and using the right paths. To compile a release build of Inko, run make and make install to install the files. This process can be customised by setting the following Make variables:

• DESTDIR: the directory to install files into when running make install.
• PREFIX: the path prefix to use for all files, defaults to /usr. When combined with DESTDIR, the value of DESTDIR prefixes this value.

For example:

make PREFIX=/usr/local
make install DESTDIR=./package-root PREFIX=/usr/local

The PREFIX variable must be set for both the make and make install commands, but DESTDIR is only necessary for make install.

Linux

The dependencies listed per platform only need to be installed in your development environment. Executables generated by Inko's compiler only need libc and libm to be installed in the deployment environment, which is likely already the case.

Alpine

Warning

Due to this bug in the llvm-sys crate, compiling the compiler for musl targets (which includes Alpine) fails with the error "could not find native static library rt, perhaps an -L flag is missing?".

There's no official package for Inko in the Alpine repositories.

The compiler dependencies are installed as follows:

sudo apk add build-base rust cargo llvm15 llvm15-dev llvm15-static git

Arch Linux

Two AUR packages are provided: inko and inko-git. These can be installed using your favourite AUR wrapper. For example, using yay:

yay -S inko

Or manually:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/inko.git
cd inko
makepkg -si

The compiler dependencies are installed as follows:

sudo pacman -Sy llvm15 rust git base-devel

Debian

There's no official package for Inko in the Debian repositories.

For Debian 12, the compiler dependencies are installed as follows:

sudo apt-get install --yes rustc cargo git build-essential llvm-15 llvm-15-dev \
    libstdc++-11-dev libclang-common-15-dev zlib1g-dev

For Debian 11, the process is a little different as the provided version of LLVM is too old. Installing the necessary dependencies is done as follows:

curl https://apt.llvm.org/llvm-snapshot.gpg.key | \
    sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/apt.llvm.org.asc
sudo add-apt-repository \
    "deb http://apt.llvm.org/bullseye/ llvm-toolchain-bullseye-15 main"
sudo apt-get update

Now we can install the necessary dependencies:

sudo apt-get install --yes git build-essential llvm-15 llvm-15-dev \
    libstdc++-10-dev libclang-common-15-dev zlib1g-dev libpolly-15-dev

The version of Rust provided by Debian 11 is also too old, so you'll need to use rustup to install the required Rust version.

Fedora

Inko isn't included in the Fedora repositories, but there's an official copr repository that you can use as follows:

sudo dnf install dnf-plugins-core
sudo dnf copr enable yorickpeterse/inko
sudo dnf install inko

For version 38 and newer, the compiler dependencies are installed as follows:

sudo dnf install gcc make rust cargo llvm15 llvm15-devel llvm15-static \
    libstdc++-devel libstdc++-static libffi-devel zlib-devel git

For version 37, the compiler dependencies are instead installed as follows (note the different LLVM package names):

sudo dnf install gcc make rust cargo llvm llvm-devel llvm-static \
    libstdc++-devel libstdc++-static libffi-devel zlib-devel git

Ubuntu

There's no official package for Inko in the Ubuntu repositories.

For Ubuntu 22.04, the compiler dependencies are installed as follows:

sudo apt-get install --yes rustc cargo git build-essential llvm-15 llvm-15-dev \
    libstdc++-11-dev libclang-common-15-dev zlib1g-dev

For Ubuntu 20.04, the process is a little different as the provided version of LLVM is too old. Installing the necessary dependencies is done as follows:

curl https://apt.llvm.org/llvm-snapshot.gpg.key | \
    sudo tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/apt.llvm.org.asc
sudo add-apt-repository \
    "deb http://apt.llvm.org/focal/ llvm-toolchain-focal-15 main"
sudo apt-get update

Now we can install the necessary dependencies:

sudo apt-get install --yes git build-essential llvm-15 llvm-15-dev \
    libstdc++-10-dev libclang-common-15-dev zlib1g-dev libpolly-15-dev

The version of Rust provided by 20.04 is also too old, so you'll need to use rustup to install the required Rust version.

macOS

Inko is available in Homebrew:

brew install inko

The Homebrew formula is maintained by Homebrew and its contributors. For issues specific to the formula (e.g. it doesn't work on a certain version of macOS), please report issues in the homebrew-core issue tracker.

To build from source, install the necessary dependencies as follows:

brew install llvm@15 rust git

When building from source, you may need to add the LLVM bin directory to your PATH as follows:

export PATH="$(brew --prefix llvm@15)/bin:$PATH"

You may also need to set the LIBRARY_PATH to the LLVM lib directory, though this doesn't always appear to be necessary:

export LIBRARY_PATH="$(brew --prefix llvm@15)/lib"

If the zstd library can't be found, even though it's installed, you can use the following instead:

export LIBRARY_PATH="$(brew --prefix llvm@15)/lib:$(brew --prefix zstd)/lib"

FreeBSD

There's no official package for Inko available on FreeBSD.

The compiler dependencies are installed as follows:

sudo pkg install llvm15 rust git

To build from source, run the following command:

LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib" cargo build

The variable LIBRARY_PATH is needed as otherwise the linker fails to find the zstd and libffi libraries, which are needed by LLVM on FreeBSD.

Tip

This variable needs to be set every time you run cargo build, cargo test, etc, so consider exporting it to your shell ahead of time.

Docker

If you are using Docker or Podman, you can use our official Docker/Podman images. These images are published on GitHub.com.

To install a specific version, run the following (replacing X.Y.Z with the version you want to install):

DockerPodman

docker pull ghcr.io/inko-lang/inko:X.Y.Z

podman pull ghcr.io/inko-lang/inko:X.Y.Z

You can then run Inko as follows:

DockerPodman

docker run inko-lang/inko:X.Y.Z inko --version

podman run inko-lang/inko:X.Y.Z inko --version

We also build a container for every commit on the main branch, provided the tests are passing. If you like to live dangerously, you can use these as follows:

DockerPodman

docker pull ghcr.io/inko-lang/inko:main
docker run inko-lang/inko:main inko --version

podman pull ghcr.io/inko-lang/inko:main
podman run inko-lang/inko:main inko --version