Install Charms

This guide installs the charms command-line tool. To run your own prover, see Run a prover server instead (it builds the charms-prover binary).

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.94 or later (stable toolchain, via rustup). Charms v15 and its app template use Rust edition 2024.

• The Protocol Buffers compiler protoc — protobuf:

  brew install protobuf      # macOS
  # or: apt-get install protobuf-compiler

• The WebAssembly target to build Charms apps:

  rustup target add wasm32-wasip1

Install the CLI

cargo install charms --locked

If you want to run your own prover, see Run a prover server instead (it builds the charms-prover binary).

Verify

charms spell vk

This prints the spell verification key as JSON, including the protocol version:

{ "prover": false, "version": 15, "vk": "00425796f4c4fa050043eee14d801b4f935244e44aad6a28de0cd5cb3de0ae52" }

Next steps

• Build a Charms app — the tutorial.
• Set up a Bitcoin node — needed to broadcast spells on testnet4.
• CLI reference — every command and option.