Installing Elvish with a package manager allows you to upgrade Elvish alongside the rest of your system, but may not give you the latest version.

If the package manager you use doesn’t have the latest version, you are strongly recommended to the official binary instead. For a comprehensive list of packages and their freshness, see this Repology page.

Arch Linux

To install the latest packaged release:

pacman -S elvish

To install the HEAD version, install elvish-git from AUR with your favorite AUR helper:

yay -S elvish-git

Debian / Ubuntu

Elvish is packaged by Debian since buster and by Ubuntu since 17.10:

apt install elvish

Fedora

Elvish is packaged for Fedora. To install it with dnf:

dnf install elvish

macOS

Elvish is packaged by both Homebrew and MacPorts.

To install from Homebrew:

# Install latest packaged release
brew install elvish
# Or install HEAD:
brew install --HEAD elvish

To install from MacPorts:

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port install elvish

Windows

Elvish is available in the Main bucket of Scoop. This will install the latest packaged release:

scoop install elvish

FreeBSD

Elvish is available in the FreeBSD ports tree and as a prebuilt package. Both methods will install the latest packaged release.

To install with pkg:

pkg install elvish

To build from the ports tree:

cd /usr/ports/shells/elvish
make install

NetBSD / pkgsrc

Elvish is available in pkgsrc. To install from a binary package, run the following command:

pkgin install elvish

To build the elvish package from source instead:

cd /usr/pkgsrc/shells/elvish
make package-install

OpenBSD

Elvish is available in the official OpenBSD package repository. This will install the latest packaged release:

doas pkg_add elvish

NixOS (nix)

Elvish is packaged in nixpkgs:

# Install latest packaged release
nix-env -i elvish