Installing pcli

Installing the Rust toolchain

This requires that you install a recent (>= 1.73) stable version of the Rust compiler, installation instructions for which you can find here. Don’t forget to reload your shell so that cargo is available in your \$PATH!

You can verify the rust compiler version by running rustc --version which should indicate version 1.73 or later.

pcli requires rustfmt as part of the build process — depending on your OS/install method for Rust, you may have to install that separately.

Installing build prerequisites

Linux

You may need to install some additional packages in order to build pcli, depending on your distribution. For a bare-bones Ubuntu installation, you can run:

sudo apt-get install build-essential pkg-config libssl-dev clang git-lfs

For a minimal Fedora/CentOS/RHEL image, you can run:

sudo dnf install openssl-devel clang git cargo rustfmt git-lfs

macOS

You may need to install the command-line developer tools if you have never done so:

xcode-select --install

You’ll also need to install Git LFS, which you can do via Homebrew:

brew install git-lfs

Making sure that git-lfs is installed

Running git lfs install will make sure that git-lfs is correctly installed on your machine.

Cloning the repository

Once you have installed the above tools, you can clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/penumbra-zone/penumbra

To build the version of pcli compatible with the current testnet, navigate to the penumbra folder, fetch the latest from the repository, and check out the latest tag for the current testnet:

cd penumbra && git fetch && git checkout v0.63.1

Building the pcli client software

Then, build the pcli tool using cargo:

cargo build --release --bin pcli

Because you are building a work-in-progress version of the client, you may see compilation warnings, which you can safely ignore.