Packaging Nim

This page provide hints on distributing Nim using OS packages.

See distros for tools to detect Linux distribution at runtime.

Supported architectures

Nim runs on a wide variety of platforms. Support on amd64 and i386 is tested regularly, while less popular platforms are tested by the community.

• amd64
• arm64 (aka aarch64)
• armel
• armhf
• i386
• m68k
• mips64el
• mipsel
• powerpc
• ppc64
• ppc64el (aka ppc64le)
• riscv64

The following platforms are seldomly tested:

• alpha
• hppa
• ia64
• mips
• s390x
• sparc64

Packaging for Linux

See https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/labels/Installation for installation-related bugs.

Build Nim from the released tarball at https://nim-lang.org/install_unix.html It is different from the GitHub sources as it contains Nimble, C sources & other tools.

The Debian package ships bash and ksh completion and manpages that can be reused.

Hints on the build process:

# build from C sources and then using koch
./build.sh --os $os_type --cpu $cpu_arch
./bin/nim c koch
./koch boot -d:release

# optionally generate docs into doc/html
./koch docs

./koch tools -d:release

# extract files to be really installed
./install.sh <tempdir>

# also include the tools
for fn in nimble nimsuggest nimgrep; do cp ./bin/$fn <tempdir>/nim/bin/; done

What to install:

• The expected stdlib location is /usr/lib/nim
• Global configuration files under /etc/nim
• Optionally: manpages, documentation, shell completion
• When installing documentation, .idx files are not required
• The "compiler" directory contains compiler sources and should not be part of the compiler binary package