If you're just interested in the Alacritty binary and you don't need the terminfo file, desktop entry, manual page or shell completions, you can install it directly through cargo:

cargo install alacritty

Note that you will still need to install the dependencies for your OS of choice. Please refer to the Dependencies section.

1. Prerequisites
   1. Source Code
   2. Rust Compiler
   3. Dependencies
      1. Debian/Ubuntu
      2. Arch Linux
      3. Fedora
      4. CentOS/RHEL 7
      5. openSUSE
      6. Slackware
      7. Void Linux
      8. FreeBSD
      9. OpenBSD
      10. Solus
      11. NixOS/Nixpkgs
      12. Gentoo
      13. Clear Linux
      14. GNU Guix
      15. Alpine Linux
      16. Windows
      17. Other
2. Building
   1. Linux/Windows/BSD
   2. macOS
3. Post Build
   1. Terminfo
   2. Desktop Entry
   3. Manual Page
   4. Shell completions
      1. Zsh
      2. Bash
      3. Fish

Before compiling Alacritty, you'll have to first clone the source code:

git clone https://github.com/alacritty/alacritty.git
cd alacritty

1. Install rustup.rs.

2. To make sure you have the right Rust compiler installed, run

   rustup override set stable
   rustup update stable

These are the minimum dependencies required to build Alacritty, please note that with some setups additional dependencies might be desired.

If you're running Wayland with an Nvidia GPU, you'll likely want the EGL drivers installed too (these are called libegl1-mesa-dev on Ubuntu).

If you'd like to build a local version manually, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's an apt command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

apt install cmake g++ pkg-config libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev libxkbcommon-dev python3

On Arch Linux, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a pacman command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

pacman -S cmake freetype2 fontconfig pkg-config make libxcb libxkbcommon python

On Fedora, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a dnf command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

dnf install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel libxcb-devel libxkbcommon-devel g++

On CentOS/RHEL 7, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a yum command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

yum install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel libxcb-devel libxkbcommon-devel xcb-util-devel
yum group install "Development Tools"

On RHEL 8, like RHEL 7, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a dnf command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

dnf install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel libxcb-devel libxkbcommon-devel
dnf group install "Development Tools"

On openSUSE, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a zypper command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

zypper install cmake freetype-devel fontconfig-devel libxcb-devel libxkbcommon-devel

Compiles out of the box for 14.2

On Void Linux, install following packages before compiling Alacritty:

xbps-install cmake freetype-devel expat-devel fontconfig-devel libxcb-devel pkg-config python3

On FreeBSD, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a pkg command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

pkg install cmake freetype2 fontconfig pkgconf python3

On OpenBSD 6.5, you need Xenocara and Rust to build Alacritty, plus Python 3 to build its XCB dependency. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

pkg_add rust python

Select the package for Python 3 (e.g. python-3.6.8p0) when prompted.

The default user limits in OpenBSD are insufficient to build Alacritty. A datasize-cur of at least 3GB is recommended (see login.conf).

On Solus, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a eopkg command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

eopkg install fontconfig-devel

The following command can be used to get a shell with all development dependencies on NixOS.

nix-shell -A alacritty '<nixpkgs>'

On Gentoo, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. The following command should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

emerge --onlydeps x11-terms/alacritty

On Clear Linux, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's a swupd command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

swupd bundle-add devpkg-expat devpkg-freetype devpkg-libxcb devpkg-fontconfig

The following command can be used to get a shell with all development dependencies on GNU Guix.

guix environment alacritty

On Alpine Linux, you need a few extra libraries to build Alacritty. Here's an apk command that should install all of them. If something is still found to be missing, please open an issue.

sudo apk add cmake pkgconf freetype-dev fontconfig-dev python3 libxcb-dev

On windows you will need to have the {architecture}-pc-windows-msvc toolchain installed as well as Clang 3.9 or greater.

If you build Alacritty on another distribution, we would love some help filling in this section of the README.

cargo build --release

On Linux/BSD, if it is desired to build Alacritty without support for either the X11 or Wayland rendering backend the following commands can be used.

# Force support for only Wayland
cargo build --release --no-default-features --features=wayland

# Force support for only X11
cargo build --release --no-default-features --features=x11

If all goes well, this should place a binary at target/release/alacritty.

make app
cp -r target/release/osx/Alacritty.app /Applications/

The following will build an executable that runs on both x86 and ARM macos architectures:

rustup target add x86_64-apple-darwin aarch64-apple-darwin
make app-universal

There are some extra things you might want to set up after installing Alacritty. All the post build instruction assume you're still inside the Alacritty repository.

To make sure Alacritty works correctly, either the alacritty or alacritty-direct terminfo must be used. The alacritty terminfo will be picked up automatically if it is installed.

If the following command returns without any errors, the alacritty terminfo is already installed:

infocmp alacritty

If it is not present already, you can install it globally with the following command:

sudo tic -xe alacritty,alacritty-direct extra/alacritty.info

Many Linux and BSD distributions support desktop entries for adding applications to system menus. This will install the desktop entry for Alacritty:

sudo cp target/release/alacritty /usr/local/bin # or anywhere else in $PATH
sudo cp extra/logo/alacritty-term.svg /usr/share/pixmaps/Alacritty.svg
sudo desktop-file-install extra/linux/Alacritty.desktop
sudo update-desktop-database

If you are having problems with Alacritty's logo, you can replace it with prerendered PNGs and simplified SVGs available in the extra/logo/compat directory.

Installing the manual page requires the additional dependencies gzip and scdoc.

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/man1
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/man/man5
scdoc < extra/man/alacritty.1.scd | gzip -c | sudo tee /usr/local/share/man/man1/alacritty.1.gz > /dev/null
scdoc < extra/man/alacritty-msg.1.scd | gzip -c | sudo tee /usr/local/share/man/man1/alacritty-msg.1.gz > /dev/null
scdoc < extra/man/alacritty.5.scd | gzip -c | sudo tee /usr/local/share/man/man5/alacritty.5.gz > /dev/null
scdoc < extra/man/alacritty-bindings.5.scd | gzip -c | sudo tee /usr/local/share/man/man5/alacritty-bindings.5.gz > /dev/null

To get automatic completions for Alacritty's flags and arguments you can install the provided shell completions.

To install the completions for zsh, you can place the extra/completions/_alacritty file in any directory referenced by $fpath.

If you do not already have such a directory registered through your ~/.zshrc, you can add one like this:

mkdir -p ${ZDOTDIR:-~}/.zsh_functions
echo 'fpath+=${ZDOTDIR:-~}/.zsh_functions' >> ${ZDOTDIR:-~}/.zshrc

Then copy the completion file to this directory:

cp extra/completions/_alacritty ${ZDOTDIR:-~}/.zsh_functions/_alacritty

To install the completions for bash, you can source the extra/completions/alacritty.bash file in your ~/.bashrc file.

If you do not plan to delete the source folder of alacritty, you can run

echo "source $(pwd)/extra/completions/alacritty.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

Otherwise you can copy it to the ~/.bash_completion folder and source it from there:

mkdir -p ~/.bash_completion
cp extra/completions/alacritty.bash ~/.bash_completion/alacritty
echo "source ~/.bash_completion/alacritty" >> ~/.bashrc

To install the completions for fish, from inside the fish shell, run

mkdir -p $fish_complete_path[1]
cp extra/completions/alacritty.fish $fish_complete_path[1]/alacritty.fish