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Installing pre-built binaries

The quickest way to get going with nextest is to download a pre-built binary for your platform.

Downloading and installing from your terminal

The instructions below are suitable for both end users and CI. These links will stay stable.

If you have cargo-binstall available:

cargo binstall cargo-nextest --secure

Info

The commands below assume that your Rust installation is managed via rustup. You can extract the archive to a different directory in your PATH if required.

If you'd like to stay on the 0.9 series to avoid breaking changes (see the stability policy for more), replace latest in the URL with 0.9.

Run in a terminal:

curl -LsSf https://get.nexte.st/latest/linux | tar zxf - -C ${CARGO_HOME:-~/.cargo}/bin

For a statically-linked binary with no runtime library dependencies, based on musl:

curl -LsSf https://get.nexte.st/latest/linux-musl | tar zxf - -C ${CARGO_HOME:-~/.cargo}/bin

Info

The command below assumes that your Rust installation is managed via rustup. You can extract the archive to a different directory in your PATH if required.

If you'd like to stay on the 0.9 series to avoid breaking changes (see the stability policy for more), replace latest in the URL with 0.9.

Run in a terminal:

curl -LsSf https://get.nexte.st/latest/linux-arm | tar zxf - -C ${CARGO_HOME:-~/.cargo}/bin

Info

The command below assumes that your Rust installation is managed via rustup. You can extract the archive to a different directory in your PATH if required.

If you'd like to stay on the 0.9 series to avoid breaking changes (see the stability policy for more), replace latest in the URL with 0.9.

Run in a terminal:

curl -LsSf https://get.nexte.st/latest/mac | tar zxf - -C ${CARGO_HOME:-~/.cargo}/bin

This will download a universal binary that works on both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs.

Info

The commands below assume that your Rust installation is managed via rustup. You can extract the archive to a different directory in your PATH if required.

If you'd like to stay on the 0.9 series to avoid breaking changes (see the stability policy for more), replace latest in the URL with 0.9.

Run in PowerShell:

$tmp = New-TemporaryFile | Rename-Item -NewName { $_ -replace 'tmp$', 'zip' } -PassThru
Invoke-WebRequest -OutFile $tmp https://get.nexte.st/latest/windows
$outputDir = if ($Env:CARGO_HOME) { Join-Path $Env:CARGO_HOME "bin" } else { "~/.cargo/bin" }
$tmp | Expand-Archive -DestinationPath $outputDir -Force
$tmp | Remove-Item

Or, using a Unix shell, curl, and tar natively on Windows (e.g. shell: bash on GitHub Actions, or Git Bash):

curl -LsSf https://get.nexte.st/latest/windows-tar | tar zxf - -C ${CARGO_HOME:-~/.cargo}/bin

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users should follow the Linux x86_64 instructions.

Other platforms

0.9.94

Run in PowerShell:

$tmp = New-TemporaryFile | Rename-Item -NewName { $_ -replace 'tmp$', 'zip' } -PassThru
Invoke-WebRequest -OutFile $tmp https://get.nexte.st/latest/windows-arm
$outputDir = if ($Env:CARGO_HOME) { Join-Path $Env:CARGO_HOME "bin" } else { "~/.cargo/bin" }
$tmp | Expand-Archive -DestinationPath $outputDir -Force
$tmp | Remove-Item

Or, using a Unix shell, curl, and tar natively on Windows (e.g. shell: bash on GitHub Actions, or Git Bash):

curl -LsSf https://get.nexte.st/latest/windows-arm-tar | tar zxf - -C ${CARGO_HOME:-~/.cargo}/bin

Run in PowerShell:

$tmp = New-TemporaryFile | Rename-Item -NewName { $_ -replace 'tmp$', 'zip' } -PassThru
Invoke-WebRequest -OutFile $tmp https://get.nexte.st/latest/windows-x86
$outputDir = if ($Env:CARGO_HOME) { Join-Path $Env:CARGO_HOME "bin" } else { "~/.cargo/bin" }
$tmp | Expand-Archive -DestinationPath $outputDir -Force
$tmp | Remove-Item

Or, using a Unix shell, curl, and tar natively on Windows (e.g. shell: bash on GitHub Actions, or Git Bash):

curl -LsSf https://get.nexte.st/latest/windows-x86-tar | tar zxf - -C ${CARGO_HOME:-~/.cargo}/bin

curl -LsSf https://get.nexte.st/latest/freebsd | tar zxf - -C ${CARGO_HOME:-~/.cargo}/bin

curl -LsSf https://get.nexte.st/latest/illumos | gunzip | tar xf - -C ${CARGO_HOME:-~/.cargo}/bin

As of 2025-04, the current version of illumos tar has a bug where tar zxf doesn't work over standard input.

Community-maintained binaries

These binaries are maintained by the community—thank you!

Run in a terminal on macOS or Linux:

brew install cargo-nextest

Run in a terminal:

pacman -S cargo-nextest

Using pre-built binaries in CI

Pre-built binaries can be used in continuous integration to speed up test runs.

Using nextest in GitHub Actions

The easiest way to install nextest in GitHub Actions is to use the Install Development Tools action maintained by Taiki Endo.

To install the latest version of nextest, add this to your job after installing Rust and Cargo:

- uses: taiki-e/install-action@nextest

See this in practice with nextest's own CI.

The action will download pre-built binaries from the URL above and add them to .cargo/bin.

To install a version series or specific version, use this instead:

- uses: taiki-e/install-action@v2
  with:
    tool: nextest
    ## version (defaults to "latest") can be a series like 0.9:
    # tool: nextest@0.9
    ## version can also be a specific version like 0.9.11:
    # tool: nextest@0.9.11

ANSI color codes

GitHub Actions supports ANSI color codes. To get color support for nextest (and Cargo), add this to your workflow:

env:
  CARGO_TERM_COLOR: always

For a full list of environment variables supported by nextest, see Environment variables.

Other CI systems

Install pre-built binaries on other CI systems by downloading and extracting the respective archives, using the commands above as a guide. See Release URLs for more about how to specify nextest versions and platforms.

Documentation

If you've made it easy to install nextest on another CI system, please feel free to submit a pull request with documentation.

Release URLs

The latest nextest release is available at:

Other platforms

Nextest's CI isn't run on these platforms -- these binaries most likely work but aren't guaranteed to do so.

These archives contain a single binary called cargo-nextest (cargo-nextest.exe on Windows). Add this binary to a location on your PATH.

For a full specification of release URLs, see Release URLs.

  1. The standard Linux binaries target glibc, and have a minimum requirement of glibc 2.27 (Ubuntu 18.04). ↩↩