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Installation

These instructions guide you through installing or updating RISC Zero tools to build your own RISC Zero zkVM projects. You will install the cargo-risczero tool for creating and building RISC Zero zkVM projects, as well as the RISC Zero toolchain used to build zkVM guest programs in Rust.

Prerequisites​

The RISC Zero zkVM requires Rust. If you don't already have Rust and rustup installed, start by installing Rust and rustup. Please follow the recommended Rust installation instructions using rustup, as RISC Zero specifically depends on the rustup tool.

Install​

rzup is the RISC Zero toolchain installer. We recommend using rzup to manage the installation of RISC Zero.

  1. Install rzup by running the following command:

    curl -L https://risczero.com/install | bash

  2. Run rzup to install RISC Zero:

    rzup

Running rzup will install the latest version of the RISC Zero toolchain.

For a specific version, use rzup --version <version>, where the <version> is a release tag.

See rzup --help for more options. You can find out more about rzup here.

Manual Installation​

For users who prefer manual installation, follow these steps:

  1. Install the cargo risczero tool and use its install command to install the Rust and C++ toolchains by running:

    cargo install cargo-binstall
    cargo binstall cargo-risczero
    cargo risczero install

    Note: To install a specific version instead of using the latest stable version, use cargo binstall cargo-risczero@<version>, where the version is a release tag.

    The version used must match the risc0-zkvm version from your guest and host.

  2. For x86-64 macOS, you must run cargo risczero build-toolchain instead of cargo risczero install.

Update​

To update your installation:

  1. Run rzup to update the RISC Zero toolchain to the latest release tag version.

After you update your installation, be sure to update your project's RISC Zero crates. To do this, you must update all RISC Zero dependencies in your project's host and guest Cargo.toml files. In most projects, this is done by updating the host and guest risc0-zkvm crate and the risc0-build build dependency. They should be updated to use the version number displayed by cargo risczero --version.