These instructions are for setting up dependencies and building Wave Terminal from source on macOS, Linux, and Windows.
See Minimum requirements to learn whether your OS is supported.
macOS does not have any platform-specific dependencies.
You must have zip
installed. We also require the Zig compiler for statically linking CGO.
Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt install zip snapd
sudo snap install zig --classic --beta
Fedora/RHEL:
sudo dnf install zip zig
Arch:
sudo pacman -S zip zig
For packaging, the following additional packages are required:
fpm
— If you're on x64 you can skip this. If you're on ARM64, install fpm via Gemrpm
— If you're not on Fedora, install RPM via your package manager.snapd
— If your distro doesn't already include it, installsnapd
lxd
— Installation instructionssnapcraft
— Runsudo snap install snapcraft --classic
libarchive-tools
— Install via your package managerlibopenjp2-tools
— Install via your package managersquashfs-tools
— Install via your package manager
You will need the GNU build toolchain installed in order for Go to work on Windows. In most cases, this requires installing MinGW-w64.
The easiest way to install this is using MSYS2: https://www.msys2.org/
If you prefer an alternative method, you can find other methods here: https://www.mingw-w64.org/downloads/
Download and install Task (to run the build commands): https://taskfile.dev/installation/
Task is a modern equivalent to GNU Make. We use it to coordinate our build steps. You can find our full Task configuration in Taskfile.yml.
Download and install Go via your package manager or directly from the website: https://go.dev/doc/install
Make sure you have a NodeJS 22 LTS installed.
See NodeJS's website for platform-specific instructions: https://nodejs.org/en/download
Once you have NodeJS installed, you'll need to enable Corepack so that Yarn Modern can work:
corepack enable
If your NodeJS distribution does not ship with Corepack, you can install it manually using NPM:
npm install -g corepack
corepack enable
Corepack's official documentation says to uninstall Yarn and PnPM first, but this is probably overkill. If you have any issues, try removing them from your system before continuing.
For more information on Corepack, check out this link.
git clone [email protected]:wavetermdev/waveterm.git
or
git clone https://github.com/wavetermdev/waveterm.git
All the methods below will install Node and Go dependencies when they run the first time. All these should be run from within the Git repository.
Run the following command to build the app and run it via Vite's development server (this enables Hot Module Reloading):
task electron:dev
Run the following command to build the app and run it standalone, without the development server. This will not reload on change:
task electron:start
Run the following command to generate a production build and package it. This lets you install the app locally. All artifacts will be placed in make/
.
task package
If you're on Linux ARM64, run the following:
USE_SYSTEM_FPM=1 task package
You can use the regular Chrome DevTools to debug the frontend application. You can open the DevTools using the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Option+I
on macOS or Ctrl+Option+I
on Linux and Windows. Logs will be sent to the Console tab in DevTools.
Backend logs for the development version of Wave can be found at ~/.waveterm-dev/waveapp.log
. Both the NodeJS backend from Electron and the main Go backend will log here.