Installing DotSlash

We provide a number of ways to install DotSlash.

note

On macOS, we strongly recommend running DotSlash as a Universal Binary rather than an x86 or ARM64 binary. If an x86 binary is running under Rosetta on Apple Silicon and ends up spawning dotslash, then for consistency with the parent process, this will ensure that the macos-x86_64 artifact will be run.

Prebuilt Binaries

We provide prebuilt binaries for macOS, [Ubuntu] Linux, and Windows on GitHub:

https://github.com/facebook/dotslash/releases/latest

For the reasons explained above, the macOS release is a Universal Binary.

Once you have downloaded DotSlash, you must ensure that dotslash (or dotslash.exe on Windows) is on your PATH. You can test that it is setup correctly on Mac or Linux by running:

/usr/bin/env dotslash --help

danger

Downloading the .tar.gz using a web browser instead of something like curl will cause macOS to tag DotSlash as "untrusted" and the security manager will prevent you from running it. You can remove this annotation as follows:

xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine ~/Downloads/dotslash-macos.*.tar.gz

GitHub Actions

We provide a GitHub Action to install dotslash for a workflow:

https://github.com/facebook/install-dotslash

It can be used from GitHub Actions workflows like so:

name: test suite
on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: facebook/install-dotslash@latest
      - run: ./some_dotslash_file

cargo install

If you are familiar with the Rust toolchain, you can also build and install DotSlash using cargo:

cargo install dotslash

Assuming you already have .cargo/bin on your PATH, you should not have to update any environment variables to get DotSlash to work.

Though note that cargo install does not create a universal binary, so you may be better off building from source.

Build from source

The short version of the build process is:

git clone https://github.com/facebook/dotslash
cd dotslash
cargo build --release

Or with Sapling:

sl clone https://github.com/facebook/dotslash
cd dotslash
cargo build --release

And then you can copy ./target/release/dotslash (or dotslash.exe on Windows) to your PATH.

macOS

Building a Universal Binary on macOS entails some extra steps:

git clone https://github.com/facebook/dotslash
cd dotslash
cargo build --release --target aarch64-apple-darwin
cargo build --release --target x86_64-apple-darwin
lipo -create -output dotslash target/aarch64-apple-darwin/release/dotslash target/x86_64-apple-darwin/release/dotslash

And then adding the dotslash file created by lipo to your PATH.

musl

On Linux, consider building DotSlash from source using musl for an even more lightweight version of the dotslash executable:

$ git clone https://github.com/facebook/dotslash
$ cd dotslash
$ rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
$ cargo build --release --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
$ target/x86_64-unknown-linux-musl/release/dotslash --help
usage: dotslash DOTSLASH_FILE [OPTIONS]
...

Note that if cargo build fails with an error like Failed to find tool. Is `musl-gcc` installed?, then you likely need to install the musl-gcc package, which rustup does not do for you.

On Ubuntu/Debian, you can install it with:

sudo apt install musl-tools

GitHub CLI

If you have the GitHub CLI (gh) installed, you can use gh release download to fetch the .tar.gz for a release instead of curl by running a command of the form:

gh release download --repo facebook/dotslash TAG --pattern PATTERN

where TAG is the name of the release (such as v0.2.0) and PATTERN is used to match the platform that matches the artifact's name (such as '*windows*') like so:

gh release download --repo facebook/dotslash v0.2.0 --pattern '*windows*'