Installation

Tessel is a single download: the tessel command (which includes the IDE and its own linker) and the runtime library that apps are built with. You don’t need anything else: no Xcode, no Visual Studio, no Rust or LLVM.

macOS

In Terminal:

curl -fsSL https://storage.googleapis.com/tessel-releases/install.sh | sh

This installs Tessel into ~/.tessel/bin and adds that folder to your PATH. Open a new terminal window afterwards.

Tessel runs on Macs with Apple silicon (M1 or later), macOS 11 or newer.

Windows

In PowerShell:

irm https://storage.googleapis.com/tessel-releases/install.ps1 | iex

This installs Tessel into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Tessel\bin and adds it to your PATH. Open a new terminal afterwards.

Tessel runs on 64-bit Windows 10 and 11.

Check that it works

tessel --version

Then make a file called hello.tsl:

fn main() {
    print("Hello, Tessel!")
}

and run it:

tessel run hello.tsl

Hello, Tessel!

Next, build your first app, or type tessel in a folder to open the Tessel IDE.

Manual download

The installers download from https://storage.googleapis.com/tessel-releases/. To install by hand, download the package for your system from the folder of the newest version (the version number is in latest.txt):

System	Package
macOS (Apple silicon)	tessel-<version>-macos-arm64.tar.gz
Windows (64-bit)	tessel-<version>-windows-x64.zip

Unpack it into a folder and add the folder to your PATH. Each version’s folder also has a SHA256SUMS file to check the download against.

On macOS, tessel is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it runs even when downloaded with a web browser.

Keep libtessel_runtime.a (tessel_runtime.lib on Windows) in the same folder as tessel: every app you build is linked with it.

Updating

tessel update

Downloads the latest release and replaces your installation with it. The download is checked against the release’s checksums before anything is changed, so an interrupted or damaged download leaves your installation as it was. Apps you’ve already built aren’t affected; rebuild them to use the new version.

• tessel update --check only says whether a newer version exists.
• tessel update v0.1.2 installs that version instead, newer or older, for example to go back after an update.

The Tessel IDE checks for a newer version when it opens, and shows an Update button in its toolbar when there is one.

tessel update came with Tessel 0.1.3. To get it from an older version, run the install command above once more.

Installing a specific version

Set TESSEL_VERSION before running the installer:

curl -fsSL https://storage.googleapis.com/tessel-releases/install.sh | TESSEL_VERSION=v0.1.0 sh

Uninstalling

Delete ~/.tessel (macOS) or %LOCALAPPDATA%\Tessel (Windows), and remove the PATH line the installer added to ~/.zshrc (macOS) or your user Path variable (Windows).

Building from source

To work on Tessel itself, see Building from source.