These instructions are for installing Verus using the binary releases, intended for most people who plan to use Verus from the command line.
If you'd rather use the VSCode IDE, you should instead read the instructions here.
If you're a Verus developer, or if you're looking for a specific commit version, you'll need to install from source. See BUILD.md.
Verus provides first-tier support to relatively recent OS distributions (MacOS, Windows and Ubuntu).
The general rule of thumb is that we lag Github's <os>-latest by one version.
These are the architectures that have release artifacts prebuilt:
- MacOS 14 (arm)
- MacOS 15 (x86_64)
- Windows 2022 (x86_64)
- Ubuntu 22.04 (x86_64)
Otherwise, you may have to build verus from source (see the build instructions).
You can select from either:
-
(Recommended) The weekly point releases. You can get the latest at https://github.com/verus-lang/verus/releases/latest
-
The rolling release, which tracks the latest commit on
main. This can be found on our release page, marked "pre-release".
After selecting the desired release, open the "Assets" drawer from the releases page and download the file appropriate to your platform.
Unzip the file and navigate into the resulting directory. In bash, for example:
unzip verus-0.2025.06.24.77d5bbe-x86-macos.zip
mv verus-x86-macos verus
cd verus
The remainder of these instructions assume this is your working directory.
If you're on MacOS, the binaries and libraries will be quarantined by Gatekeeper, which will pop up a number of messages about running software downloaded from the internet. We provide a script to fix this automatically. You can inspect the script first, if you'd like.
From the directory in the previou step:
bash macos_allow_gatekeeper.sh
To check if this step is necessary, run ./verus. It may print an error telling you to install rustup, or to install the necessary toolchain. If so, it will output instructions on what to install and how to install it. Repeat until Verus doesn't report any such error.
For example, if rustup is not available, you'll see something like:
$ ./verus
verus: rustup not found, or not executable
verus needs a rustup installation
run the following command (in a bash-compatible shell) to install rustup:
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh -s -- --default-toolchain 1.86.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
or visit https://rustup.rs/ for more information
Follow these instructions to obtain rustup and the current version of the toolchain used by Verus, then run verus again.
If rustup has been installed, but the necessary toolchain has not been installed, then when you run ./verus will instead print:
$ ./verus
verus: required rust toolchain 1.86.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu not found
run the following command (in a bash-compatible shell) to install the necessary toolchain:
rustup install 1.86.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
error: toolchain '1.86.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu' is not installed
Follow the instructions to install the necessary toolchain.
You can now run ./verus to verify and compile verus files and projects.
Now you're ready to write some Verus! Check out our guide if you haven't yet.