Installing wasmtime

Here we'll show you how to install the wasmtime command line tool. Note that this is distinct from embedding the Wasmtime project into another, for that you'll want to consult the embedding documentation.

The easiest way to install the wasmtime CLI tool is through our installation script. Linux and macOS users can execute the following:

curl https://wasmtime.dev/install.sh -sSf | bash

This will download a precompiled version of wasmtime, place it in $HOME/.wasmtime, and update your shell configuration to place the right directory in PATH.

Windows users will want to visit our releases page and can download the MSI installer (wasmtime-dev-x86_64-windows.msi for example) and use that to install.

You can confirm your installation works by executing:

$ wasmtime -V
wasmtime 30.0.0 (ede663c2a 2025-02-19)

And now you're off to the races! Be sure to check out the various CLI options as well.

Download Precompiled Binaries

If you'd prefer to not use an installation script, or you're perhaps orchestrating something in CI, you can also download one of our precompiled binaries of wasmtime. We have two channels of releases right now for precompiled binaries:

  1. Each tagged release will have a full set of release artifacts on the GitHub releases page.
  2. The dev release is also continuously updated with the latest build of the main branch. If you want the latest-and-greatest and don't mind a bit of instability, this is the release for you.

When downloading binaries you'll likely want one of the following archives (for the dev release)

Each of these archives has a wasmtime binary placed inside which can be executed normally as the CLI would.

Install via Cargo

If you have Rust and Cargo available in your system, you can build and install an official wasmtime release from its crates.io source:

cargo install wasmtime-cli

This compiles and installs wasmtime into your Cargo bin directory (typically $HOME/.cargo/bin). Make sure that directory is in your PATH before running wasmtime. For example, add the following line to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc:

export PATH="$HOME/.cargo/bin:$PATH"

You can also use binstall to automatically find and install the correct wasmtime binary for your system, matching a candidate from GitHub Releases:

cargo binstall wasmtime-cli

Compiling from Source

If you'd prefer to compile the wasmtime CLI from source, you'll want to consult the contributing documentation for building. Be sure to use a --release build if you're curious to do benchmarking!