Installation

In general, tagged releases are more practical for projects that have dependencies and benefit from stability, while development builds are for people who want to help participate in the development of the Zig project.

Zig installations are self-contained archives that can be placed anywhere in your system. Multiple versions of Zig coexist without issue.

Direct download

This is the most straight-forward way of obtaining Zig: grab a Zig bundle for your platform from the Downloads page, extract it in a directory and add it to your PATH to be able to call zig from any location.

Setting up PATH on Windows

To setup your path on Windows run one of the following snippets of code in a Powershell instance. Choose if you want to apply this change on a system-wide level (requires running Powershell with admin privileges) or just for your user, and make sure to change the snippet to point at the location where your copy of Zig lies. The ; before C: is not a typo.

System wide (admin Powershell):

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable(
"Path",
[Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "Machine") + ";C:\your-path\zig-windows-x86_64-your-version",
"Machine"
)

User level (Powershell):

[Environment]::SetEnvironmentVariable(
"Path",
[Environment]::GetEnvironmentVariable("Path", "User") + ";C:\your-path\zig-windows-x86_64-your-version",
"User"
)

After you’re done, restart your Powershell instance.

Setting up PATH on Linux, macOS, BSD

Add the location of your zig binary to your PATH environment variable.

This is generally done by adding an export line to your shell startup script (.profile, .zshrc, …)

export PATH=$PATH:~/path/to/zig

After you’re done, either source your startup file or restart your shell.

Package managers

Windows

WinGet

Zig is available on WinGet.

winget install -e --id zig.zig

Chocolatey

Zig is available on Chocolatey.

choco install zig

Scoop

Zig is available on Scoop.

scoop install zig

Latest dev build:

scoop bucket add versions
scoop install versions/zig-dev

macOS

Homebrew

Latest tagged release:

brew install zig

MacPorts

sudo port install zig

Linux

Zig is also present in many package managers for Linux.

Building from source

Ensure you have the required dependencies:

• CMake >= 3.15
• System C/C++ Toolchain
• LLVM, Clang, LLD development libraries, version 21.x, compiled with the same system C/C++ toolchain.
  • If the system package manager lacks these libraries, or has them misconfigured, see below for how to build them from source. Then it is the standard CMake build process:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make install

Use CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH if needed to help CMake find LLVM.

This produces stage3/bin/zig which is the Zig compiler built by itself.

Building from Source without LLVM

In this case, the only system dependency is a C compiler.

cc -o bootstrap bootstrap.c
./bootstrap

This produces a zig2 executable in the current working directory. This is a "stage2" build of the compiler, without LLVM extensions, and is therefore lacking these features

Syntax Highlighters and LSP

All major text editors have syntax highlight support for Zig. Some bundle it, some others require installing a plugin.

If you’re interested in a deeper integration between Zig and your editor, checkout zigtools/zls.

If you’re interested in what else is available, checkout the Tools section.

Run Hello World

If you completed the installation process correctly, you should now be able to invoke the Zig compiler from your shell.

Let’s test this by creating your first Zig program!

Navigate to your projects directory and run:

mkdir hello-world
cd hello-world
zig init

This should output:

info: created build.zig
info: created build.zig.zon
info: created src/main.zig
info: created src/root.zig
info: see `zig build --help` for a menu of options

Running zig build run should then compile the executable and run it, ultimately resulting in:

All your codebase are belong to us.
Run `zig build test` to run the tests.

Congratulations, you have a working Zig installation!