Installation

Just want to try the language?

The playground runs Saule in your browser with nothing to install.

One command

macOS and Linux

curl -fsSL https://lauriszz123.github.io/saule/install.sh | sh

Windows

irm https://lauriszz123.github.io/saule/install.ps1 | iex

Then open a new terminal:

saule --version

The installer picks the right build for your machine, verifies it against the release’s SHA256SUMS, installs both binaries into ~/.saule/bin (%USERPROFILE%\.saule\bin on Windows), and puts that directory on your PATH. Running it again upgrades in place.

Two channels

That command installs the stable channel, which is the one to want unless you have a reason otherwise.

Channel	What you get
stable	The newest release that has been blessed as stable. Moves only when somebody decides it should. The default.
latest	The newest release of any kind — whatever the last push to main built. New features arrive here first, and so do new bugs.

Both channels carry the same kind of version number: 26.7 is 26.7 on either one. Stability is a property of the release, not of the version, so there is no -stable suffix to parse and min_saule_version keeps working unchanged.

To take the latest channel:

macOS and Linux

SAULE_CHANNEL=latest curl -fsSL https://lauriszz123.github.io/saule/install.sh | sh

Windows

$env:SAULE_CHANNEL='latest'; irm https://lauriszz123.github.io/saule/install.ps1 | iex

Your choice is remembered in ~/.saule/channel, so re-running the installer upgrades you within the channel you picked rather than quietly moving you to the other one. To switch, set SAULE_CHANNEL again. To see which one you are on, read that file — and saule --version reports the version either way.

Which should I report bugs against?

Say which channel you are on. “The latest” means two different builds depending on the answer, and that is usually the first thing worth knowing.

Reading it first

Piping a script into a shell is worth being suspicious of. Both scripts are short and are served from this site over HTTPS; read either before running it:

curl -fsSL https://lauriszz123.github.io/saule/install.sh | less

Options

Both installers are configured by environment variables.

Variable	Effect
SAULE_CHANNEL	stable (the default) or latest — see Two channels
SAULE_VERSION	Install one exact version, e.g. 26.7. Overrides SAULE_CHANNEL, and does not change the channel you are remembered as being on
SAULE_HOME	Install root. Used verbatim — it is the directory, not a parent to append .saule to. Defaults to ~/.saule
SAULE_NO_MODIFY_PATH=1	Install the binaries but leave your shell profile and PATH alone

SAULE_VERSION=26.7 curl -fsSL https://lauriszz123.github.io/saule/install.sh | sh

What gets installed

Binary	Purpose
saule	The compiler and runtime, plus check, test, fmt, init and the package commands
saule-lsp	The language server, used by every editor plugin

Both, always. The editor plugins find the language server on PATH or in ~/.saule/bin. Without saule-lsp installed you get syntax highlighting and indentation (which are client-side) but no formatting, hover, or diagnostics.

Installing by hand

Every release publishes a signed-checksum archive per platform on the releases page.

# Verify before unpacking — SHA256SUMS covers every archive in the release.
shasum -a 256 -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing

tar xzf saule-<version>-<triple>.tar.gz
mkdir -p ~/.saule/bin
cp saule-<version>-<triple>/saule saule-<version>-<triple>/saule-lsp ~/.saule/bin/
export PATH="$HOME/.saule/bin:$PATH"

Supported triples:

Platform	Triple
macOS, Apple Silicon	aarch64-apple-darwin
macOS, Intel	x86_64-apple-darwin
Linux x86-64, glibc	x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Linux x86-64, musl (Alpine, or an older glibc than the build’s)	x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
Linux ARM64	aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu
Windows x86-64	x86_64-pc-windows-msvc

macOS quarantine

If you downloaded the archive in a browser rather than with curl, macOS flags it: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/.saule/bin. The one-line installer is not affected, because curl does not set the flag.

Building from source

Saule is written in Rust and needs a toolchain on edition 2024 — Rust 1.85 or newer.

git clone https://github.com/lauriszz123/saule.git
cd saule
cargo build --release -p saule-cli -p saule-lsp

That produces both binaries in target/release/. Copy them into ~/.saule/bin, or add target/release to your PATH.

macOS GUI applications

The plugins also look in ~/.saule/bin directly, so an IDE started from the Dock or Finder finds the toolchain even though it never read ~/.zshrc.

Updating and uninstalling

To update, run the install command again.

To uninstall, delete ~/.saule (on Windows, %USERPROFILE%\\.saule), which also removes every installed package. Then remove the line the installer added to your shell profile, such as ~/.zshrc, or on Windows remove .saule\\bin from your user Path.

Editor support

Each editor plugin has its own repository — saule-vscode, saule-nvim and saule-intellij. See Editor Support for per-editor setup.

Next steps

Write something: Your First Program.