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Requirements

Minimums for running a released build, and the extras needed to build from source. Split into two top-level sections.

Running a released build

These are the floors for end users downloading from the Releases page.

macOS

  • macOS 11 Big Sur or later. Per-arch builds: arm64 for Apple Silicon, amd64 for Intel. Pick the artifact matching your CPU.
  • Gatekeeper warning on first launch — the app is ad-hoc signed but not notarized. Right-click → Open to bypass. If macOS still refuses with "damaged" or "unidentified developer," strip the quarantine flag: xattr -cr Baudrun.app. The .dmg installer handles signatures correctly out of the box; the .zip works once unpacked with Finder or ditto -x -k.
  • USB-to-serial drivers where applicable — see the chipset table in README.md.

The 11.0 floor is set by Tauri v2's webview baseline (Apple Silicon's own minimum) and bundle.macOS.minimumSystemVersion in src-tauri/tauri.conf.json.

Windows

  • Windows 10 21H2 or later, or Windows 11. amd64 and arm64 builds shipped separately; pick the matching artifact.
  • Microsoft Edge WebView2 Runtime — already installed on Windows 11 and most recent Windows 10 builds. Baudrun surfaces a pointer to the installer if it's missing.
  • SmartScreen warning on first launch — unsigned, so click "More info" → "Run anyway". Code signing is tracked in TODO.md.
  • Windows 10 1803–21H1 will technically run WebView2, but nothing older than 21H2 is tested or supported here.
  • Pre-release builds (v*-alpha.N, v*-beta.N, v*-rc.N) ship the NSIS .exe installer only. Stable releases additionally produce an .msi for corporate silent-deploy workflows; WiX rejects alphanumeric pre-release identifiers, so MSI is held to stable tags.

Linux

  • GTK3 ≥ 3.22 plus WebKit2GTK 4.1 (libwebkit2gtk-4.1-0). WebKit2GTK 4.0 was deprecated upstream in 2024 and isn't supported.
  • Concretely, this means:
  • Ubuntu 24.04 Noble+
  • Debian 13 Trixie+
  • Fedora 40+
  • Arch (rolling)
  • openSUSE Tumbleweed (rolling)
  • .deb / .rpm / .pkg.tar.zst declare GTK3 + WebKit2GTK-4.1 + libusb-1.0 as package deps, so apt / dnf / pacman pull them in. They also install a udev rule (/usr/lib/udev/rules.d/60-baudrun-serial.rules) that grants the console user ACL access to /dev/ttyUSB* via systemd-logind's uaccess tag — no need to add yourself to the dialout group.
  • AppImage has the same runtime requirement plus FUSE (libfuse2 on Ubuntu, fuse2 on most others). Run with --appimage-extract-and-run if FUSE is unavailable. The AppImage doesn't run the post-install udev hook the package installers do, so AppImage users still need group / udev setup of their own.

Building from source

Common toolchain

Tool Minimum Why
Rust stable (1.77+) rust-version in src-tauri/Cargo.toml.
Node.js 20 LTS Used by Vite 8 + Svelte 5. CI uses Node 20.
@tauri-apps/cli v2 Pulled in as a dev-dep via npm install; no separate global install. 
# Install Rust (if you don't already have it)
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
# Or via Homebrew: brew install rustup-init && rustup-init -y

# Pull in the Tauri CLI + frontend deps
npm install

macOS host

  • Xcode Command Line Tools (xcode-select --install) for the Apple toolchain against WebKit.
  • libusb + pkg-config (brew install libusb pkg-config) for the link against rusb inside the vendored src-tauri/src/usbserial/ CP210x backend.
  • Producing a universal artifact is not in the build flow — each release ships a native per-arch binary instead (npm run tauri build -- --target aarch64-apple-darwin on Apple Silicon, --target x86_64-apple-darwin on Intel). Homebrew's libusb is per-arch only, so a universal binary would need a hand-lipo'd libusb dylib; splitting sidesteps that.
  • SDK version matters for window chrome. The release workflow pins the macos-26 runner (arm64) so binaries link against the Tahoe SDK and pick up macOS 26 window corners. The Intel slot uses macos-15-intel. Building on an older macOS still works, but the resulting binary falls back to legacy window chrome when run on macOS 26 hosts.

Windows host

  • Visual Studio Build Tools 2022 (MSVC + Windows SDK) — the link.exe toolchain Tauri / wry / webview2-com-sys need.
  • Native ARM for arm64 builds. Like Wails before it, Tauri v2 doesn't cleanly cross-compile to Windows-on-ARM from x86 Windows; use a native ARM host (Surface Pro X, Copilot+ PC, the windows-11-arm GitHub runner).

Linux host

  • Runtime deps + their -dev headers for the link step: 
    libgtk-3-dev libwebkit2gtk-4.1-dev libsoup-3.0-dev \
  libayatana-appindicator3-dev librsvg2-dev \
  libusb-1.0-0-dev libudev-dev pkg-config
  • xdg-utils is bundled into the AppImage so plugin-opener works on target hosts without it. Install on the build host with sudo apt install xdg-utils (omitted from the runtime list above because it's a build-time copy-into-bundle, not a link-time dep).
  • Cross-compiling Linux from macOS or Windows is not supported. Use a Linux host, a Linux VM, or CI.
  • Extra tools only needed for packaging:
  • fpm — drives .pkg.tar.zst output (sudo gem install fpm). Tauri's bundler handles .deb, .rpm, and .AppImage natively but doesn't target pacman.
  • libarchive-tools — provides bsdtar, which fpm shells out to when building .pkg.tar.zst.
  • file + libfuse2t64 — needed by Tauri's AppImage bundler (appimagetool is downloaded on-demand by the bundler).

Why these floors?

  • macOS 11: Apple Silicon's own minimum and Tauri v2 / WebKit's effective baseline. The bundle's minimumSystemVersion reflects this.
  • Windows 10 21H2: the last consumer-supported Windows 10 tail for Microsoft's long-tail updates. WebView2 technically runs on 1809+, but 21H2 is the tested floor.
  • WebKit2GTK 4.1: upstream deprecated the 4.0 series in 2024 and Ubuntu 24.04 stopped shipping it. Targeting 4.1 keeps us aligned with the long-term Linux ecosystem at the cost of dropping pre- 24.04 distros.
  • Rust stable / Node 20: both current stable / LTS. We pin rust-version = "1.77" in Cargo.toml because that's the floor Tauri v2's tauri-build macro requires; nothing in our own code needs anything newer.

Upstream references

  • Tauri v2 prerequisites — https://tauri.app/start/prerequisites/
  • Microsoft Edge WebView2 supported OSes — https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/webview2/concepts/distribution
  • Svelte 5 runtime requirements — https://svelte.dev/
  • WebKit2GTK releases — https://webkitgtk.org/releases