2. Installing

You will end this chapter with one folder holding three things: the Anvil engine, a copy of the Anvil repository (for the C# step SDK), and an empty C# project where your steps will go.

$ mkdir ~/anvil-book
$ cd ~/anvil-book

The engine

Anvil is one statically linked binary; there is nothing to install system-wide. Download it from the release page, check it, and unpack it:

$ curl -sSLO https://github.com/anlaco/anvil/releases/download/v0.5.0/anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-linux-musl.tar.gz
$ curl -sSLO https://github.com/anlaco/anvil/releases/download/v0.5.0/SHA256SUMS
$ sha256sum --check --ignore-missing SHA256SUMS
anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-linux-musl.tar.gz: OK
$ tar xzf anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-linux-musl.tar.gz

(sha256sum prints OK in your system’s language.)

The folder it creates holds anvil, the engine, and anvil-exec-wasm, which chapter 12 uses. Put it on your PATH — in every new terminal you open for this book:

$ export PATH="$PWD/anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-linux-musl:$PATH"

and check:

$ anvil --version
anvil 0.5.0

anvil --version writes to the error stream, not to standard output, so anvil --version | something reads nothing (#75).

On Windows, follow the Windows section at the end of this chapter instead.

The step SDK

Your steps will use a small library, Anvil.Step. In 0.5.0 it is not yet published on NuGet, so you take it from the repository, at the tag that matches your engine:

$ git clone --depth 1 --branch v0.5.0 https://github.com/anlaco/anvil.git anvil

git will print a note about a “detached HEAD”: that is what checking out a tag looks like, and it is fine. You will not build Anvil from this copy — you only point your project at the SDK inside it. When the package reaches NuGet, this step goes away.

The project

$ dotnet --version
$ dotnet new console --output Bench

The first command must print a version starting with 10.. The second creates Bench/, the executor you will fill with steps from chapter 3 on.

Your folder now looks like this:

~/anvil-book/
├── anvil/                               the repository, for the SDK
├── anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-linux-musl/      the engine
└── Bench/                               your steps

The Sequence Editor

The release also carries the Sequence Editor, a graphical editor for the same files, as anvil-editor-v0.5.0-x86_64-linux.AppImage, a .deb and a Windows installer. This book does not use it yet (see the contents).

If you try the AppImage and it stops at dlopen(): error loading libfuse.so.2, your system lacks FUSE 2, which recent Ubuntu releases no longer install. The AppImage runs without it once extracted:

$ chmod +x anvil-editor-v0.5.0-x86_64-linux.AppImage
$ ./anvil-editor-v0.5.0-x86_64-linux.AppImage --appimage-extract
$ ./squashfs-root/AppRun

On Windows

Everything above has a Windows equivalent, in Windows PowerShell — the one Windows already has; open it from the Start menu. This section was run on a GitHub Actions Windows machine (Windows Server 2025, build 26100, Windows PowerShell 5.1), with the downloads marked as coming from the Internet as a browser marks them. It has not been run on a Windows desktop: what Windows’ own security prompts do there is not verified.

Download

On the release page, under Assets, download two files. Your browser saves them in Downloads:

• anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-windows.zip — the engine;
• SHA256SUMS — the checksums, to confirm the download is intact.

Check and unpack

PS> mkdir $HOME\anvil-book
PS> cd $HOME\anvil-book
PS> Move-Item "$HOME\Downloads\anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-windows.zip", "$HOME\Downloads\SHA256SUMS" .
PS> (Get-FileHash .\anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-windows.zip -Algorithm SHA256).Hash
2F2AA5AF9044B2BBBA42E66434361EBC220EF1849E73F927FFC50121307EC96A
PS> Select-String anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-windows.zip .\SHA256SUMS
C:\Users\you\anvil-book\SHA256SUMS:5:2f2aa5af9044b2bbba42e66434361ebc220ef1849e73f927ffc50121307ec96a  anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-windows.zip

The two hashes must be the same digits; PowerShell prints them in capitals and the file in lower case. Then unpack:

PS> Expand-Archive .\anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-windows.zip -DestinationPath .

It creates anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-windows\, with anvil.exe and anvil-exec-wasm.exe. They are built not to need the Visual C++ runtime; the test machine had it installed anyway, so a machine without it is not verified.

If you unpack with the Explorer instead (right click → Extract All), the files inside may keep the “downloaded from the Internet” mark. On the test machine anvil.exe ran from PowerShell with the mark on; if your Windows refuses to run it, remove the mark from the whole folder:

PS> Get-ChildItem -Recurse .\anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-windows | Unblock-File

Neither anvil.exe nor the editor installer is digitally signed in 0.5.0, so Windows may warn before running them. That warning was not reproduced here.

Put it on the path

In every PowerShell window you open for this book:

PS> $env:Path = "$PWD\anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-windows;$env:Path"
PS> anvil --version
anvil 0.5.0

The SDK and the project

The same commands as on Linux, and git and the .NET 10 SDK must be installed first:

PS> git clone --depth 1 --branch v0.5.0 https://github.com/anlaco/anvil.git anvil
PS> dotnet --version
PS> dotnet new console --output Bench

C:\Users\you\anvil-book\
├── anvil\                               the repository, for the SDK
├── anvil-v0.5.0-x86_64-windows\         the engine
└── Bench\                               your steps

The rest of the book on Windows

The chapters are written for a Linux shell. Chapters 3 and 4 were also run on the Windows machine, up to running sequences/first.yseq and reading its JSON report: the C# project, dotnet run and anvil behave the same and print the same output. Paths work with either / or \. Where a command in the book is shell syntax, use:

A few sessions pipe into tail or grep only to shorten what they show; on Windows, run the command without them. Chapters 5 to 13 and the Python and Rust steps of chapter 12 have not been run on Windows.

The Sequence Editor on Windows

Download anvil-editor-v0.5.0-x86_64-windows-setup.exe from the same page and run it. On the test machine it installed for the current user, into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\@anvileditor\, and added Anvil Sequence Editor to the Start menu. That was checked with a silent install (setup.exe /S); the installer’s own window, and whether it asks for administrator rights, were not. Remember that in 0.5.0 the packaged editor cannot run a sequence (#80).