Requirements

Building native apps on your own machine needs a working native toolchain. every doctor checks all of it and names what is missing. Here is what it looks for.

The checklist#

• Ruby 3.2+ and a Rails, Hanami, or Sinatra app.
• Rust and Cargo. The desktop shell is a Tauri app, which builds with Cargo.
• A C/C++ toolchain. Xcode Command Line Tools on macOS (xcode-select --install); build-essential and friends on Linux.
• rbe-tebako, our maintained fork of Tebako, which presses your app and the Ruby runtime into one binary. It ships as a dependency of the gem.
• Homebrew bison on macOS. The system one is far too old for tebako's build, and Homebrew keeps its own off your PATH, so every doctor asks brew directly.
• Full Xcode, not just the Command Line Tools, for iOS builds. See Building for iOS.
• Android Studio for Android builds. It provisions the SDK, adb, the emulator and a JDK together, and nothing needs to go on your PATH. See Building for Android.

Desktop builds are macOS-only today.

Run the doctor#

cd my_app
every doctor

Every section always prints, so one run answers "what can this machine build?". Only the sections your build.targets name can fail the run; the rest are marked informational.

→ Desktop target
✓ rbe-tebako installed
✓ cargo installed
✓ homebrew bison

→ iOS target (not in build.targets, informational)
✓ full Xcode selected
✓ iOS Simulator SDK
✓ Simulator runtime matches the iOS SDK (xcodebuild -downloadPlatform iOS)
✓ bundled iOS shell template

→ Android target (not in build.targets, informational)
✓ Android SDK (~/Library/Android/sdk)
✓ JDK 17+ (found 17)
✓ Android SDK command-line tools (~/Library/Android/sdk/cmdline-tools/latest/bin/sdkmanager)
✓ adb (~/Library/Android/sdk/platform-tools/adb)
✓ emulator (~/Library/Android/sdk/emulator/emulator)
✓ an Android virtual device (Medium_Phone_API_35)
✓ platforms;android-36 (have android-35, android-36)
✓ bundled Android shell template

✓ ready to build

Every ✗ comes with the one command that fixes it. Re-run until it is green before moving on. To require a toolchain your build.targets do not yet name, pass the target: every doctor --target ios-arm64.

The first build is the slow one. Your first every build compiles the whole rbe-tebako toolchain, which takes 30 to 90 minutes. Later builds take a few minutes. To skip the local toolchain, the Platform builds on hosted runners.

Next: your first build.