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Building astar

There is one published binary: a Developer ID-signed, notarized astar.dmg for the macOS app, on the releases page. It is a single arm64 slice for macOS 13 or later. Everything else — the engine, astar-server, the Iced client, and the macOS app on an Intel Mac — is built from source.

There is no Homebrew tap, no cask, and no App Store listing.

just is the command palette; run it with no arguments to list every recipe.

Pick what you are building

One repository, three deliverables, and they have very different requirements. Build only the one you want.

  • The engine

    astar-lib — the Rust crates under crates/. Protocol, codecs, audio, PTT, the C ABI. Needs nothing but a Rust toolchain, builds on macOS, Linux and Windows.

    cargo build --workspace

  • Building the macOS app

    The SwiftUI menu-bar client. The heaviest set of prerequisites — a full Xcode, XcodeGen, and one mandatory extra step (just xcframework) that a fresh checkout must not skip.

    just xcframework && just run

  • The Windows / Linux client

    The Iced client, apps/gui. Builds and runs natively on both, and is not finished — treat it as a work in progress rather than something to install.

    cargo run -p astar-gui

  • astar-server

    The headless node daemon. A plain cargo binary plus a config file; the easiest thing here to build and the only one meant to run unattended.

    just node

The 60-second version

If you only want to know whether the tree is healthy on your machine:

git clone https://github.com/rcludwick/astar
cd astar
cargo build --workspace
just ci                 # fmt + clippy + test + C-header drift

That needs a Rust toolchain and nothing else (plus two dev packages on Linux — see Prerequisites). No Xcode, no Swift, no Python.

Toolchain at a glance

You want Rust Xcode Other
The engine crates ✅ — Linux: libasound2-dev, libudev-dev
astar-server ✅ — same
The Iced client ✅ — Linux: X11/Wayland runtime libraries
The macOS app ✅ ✅ full XcodeGen, just
The Swift bindings ✅ ✅ full —
The Python binding ✅ — python3
These docs — — uv (or any pip)

MSRV is 1.89, edition 2024. That floor comes from the Iced client's dependency graph; the engine crates on their own build on 1.86. The repository pins a toolchain in rust-toolchain.toml, so rustup will fetch the right one without being asked.

Where things end up

Artifact Path
Rust binaries and libraries target/debug/, target/release/
The macOS app apps/macos/build/DD/Build/Products/Debug/astar.app
A local disk image apps/macos/build/astar.dmg
The Swift xcframeworks bindings/swift/astar.xcframework, bindings/swift-serial/astarserial.xcframework
The documentation site docs/.site/

All of those are gitignored and fully regenerable. Deleting target/ or an xcframework costs you a rebuild and nothing else.

Next steps