Installation - Difftastic Manual
Description: The official manual for difftastic, the syntactic differ

# Installation

## Installing a binary

Difftastic provides GitHub releases with prebuilt binaries. The changelog describes the changes in each release.

Packages are also available on the following platforms.

## Installing via homebrew (on macOS or Linux)

Difftastic can be installed with Homebrew on macOS or Linux.

    $ brew install difftastic

## Installing from source

### Build Requirements

Difftastic is written in Rust, so you will need Rust installed. I recommend rustup to install Rust. Difftastic requires Rust version 1.59 or later.

You will also need a C++ compiler that supports C++14. If you're using GCC, you need at least version 8.

### Build

You can download and build difftastic on crates.io with Cargo (which is part of Rust).

    $ cargo install --locked difftastic

Difftastic uses the `cc` crate for building C/C++ dependencies. This allows you to use environment variables `CC` and `CXX` to control the compiler used (see the cc docs).

See contributing for instructions on debug builds.

## (Optional) Install MIME Database

If a MIME database is available, difftastic will use it to detect binary files more accurately. This is the same database used by the `file` command, so you probably already have it.

The MIME database path is specified in the XDG specification. The database should be at one of the following paths:

- `/usr/share/mime/magic`
- `/usr/local/share/mime/magic`
- `$HOME/.local/share/mime/magic`