Step‑by‑Step Guide to Installing Nushell on Linux, macOS, and Fedora

What is Nushell

Nushell is a modern, cross‑platform shell written in Rust. It provides a data‑oriented command line experience with strong type safety and aims to reduce bugs compared with traditional shells.

Installation prerequisites

Install the required development libraries before building or installing Nushell.

Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y pkg-config libssl-dev libxcb-composite0-dev libx11-dev

RHEL‑based distributions

sudo yum install -y libxcb openssl-devel libX11-devel

macOS (Homebrew)

brew install openssl cmake

Install Nushell on Linux

Download the latest release archive from the official GitHub repository, extract it, and move the binaries and plugins to a directory in /usr/local/bin that is in the system PATH.

cd /tmp
curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/nushell/nushell/releases/latest \
  | grep browser_download_url | cut -d '"' -f4 \
  | grep '\linux.tar.gz' | wget -i -

tar -xvf nu_*_linux.tar.gz
sudo mv nu_*_linux/nushell-*/nu /usr/local/bin/nu
sudo mv nu_*_linux/nushell-*/nu_plugin* /usr/local/bin/

Install Nushell on macOS

Two options are available:

Homebrew brew install nushell Manual binary download

cd /tmp
curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/nushell/nushell/releases/latest \
  | grep browser_download_url | cut -d '"' -f4 \
  | grep '\macOS.zip' | wget -i -
unzip nu_*_macOS.zip
sudo mv nu_*_macOS/nushell-*/nu /usr/local/bin/nu
sudo mv nu_*_macOS/nushell-*/nu_plugin* /usr/local/bin/

Alternative: Install via Fedora COPR

sudo dnf copr enable atim/nushell -y && sudo dnf install nushell -y

Create a new user and set Nushell as the default shell

Example using a user named techviewleo:

sudo adduser techviewleo
sudo chsh -s /usr/local/bin/nu techviewleo
su - techviewleo

After login the prompt will appear as:

/home/techviewleo>

Verify the installation

Run a basic command such as ls inside Nushell to confirm it works.

ls

Official repository: https://github.com/nushell/nushell