Installation

Prebuilt binaries

Every tagged release of ratect-compat or ratect publishes prebuilt binaries as GitHub Release assets, for five platforms:

ratect-compat and ratect are tagged and released independently (see ROADMAP.md), so they’re listed as separate entries on the Releases page — tags look like ratect-compat/vX.Y.Z and ratect/vX.Y.Z. Find the most recent tag for the binary you want, then download the archive matching your platform from that release’s assets.

Each archive extracts to a directory (named after the archive itself) containing the binary alongside LICENSE/NOTICE/README.md/RELEASES.md — the binary isn’t at the archive’s top level:

tar -xf ratect-compat-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz
mv ratect-compat-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu/ratect-compat ~/.local/bin/

(substitute the archive name for your platform and binary; ~/.local/bin assumes it’s already on your PATH — use whatever directory you normally install user binaries into.)

macOS: Ratect’s binaries aren’t code-signed or notarized. If macOS refuses to run the extracted binary (“cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified” or similar — some download methods, like a browser, mark a downloaded file quarantined; others, like curl, don’t), clear it:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine ratect-compat-x86_64-apple-darwin/ratect-compat

Homebrew

Each release also publishes a formula to a shared tap (or1can/homebrew-tap) for both binaries:

brew install or1can/tap/ratect-compat
brew install or1can/tap/ratect

Install script

Each release also publishes a shell installer that downloads, verifies, and extracts the right archive for your platform in one step:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/or1can/ratect/releases/download/ratect-compat/vX.Y.Z/ratect-compat-installer.sh | sh

Substitute the tag (ratect-compat/vX.Y.Z or ratect/vX.Y.Z) for the release you want, and ratect-compat-installer.sh/ratect-installer.sh for the matching binary — see the Releases page for both. Installs to $CARGO_HOME/bin (or $HOME/.cargo/bin), adding that directory to PATH via your shell profile if it isn’t already there.

Verifying a download

Each release also includes a sha256.sum covering every archive and the source tarball, and every archive/SBOM/sha256.sum itself carries a GitHub Artifact Attestation confirming it was built by Ratect’s own CI from the tagged source, not tampered with in transit:

# Checksum (Linux: sha256sum -c sha256.sum). A trailing blank line in the
# file itself makes shasum warn "1 line is improperly formatted" — harmless,
# every real entry still verifies.
shasum -a 256 -c sha256.sum

# Provenance (requires the GitHub CLI, `gh`)
gh attestation verify ratect-compat-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.xz --repo or1can/ratect

Not yet available

cargo-binstall needs Ratect published to crates.io to discover a release automatically, which is itself blocked — see decisions/0010’s crates.io deferral.

Building from source

The from-source path below is for contributors, or anyone on a platform without a prebuilt binary.

Prerequisites

• Rust (stable toolchain)

• Docker, running and reachable via the default local socket (Ratect connects the same way the docker CLI does — no extra configuration needed for a standard Docker install).

  Docker 20.10 or newer. Ratect negotiates the Docker Engine API version against your daemon at connection time, downgrading to whatever it offers, so any recent Docker install works with no extra configuration. 20.10 (December 2020) is Ratect’s own floor below that negotiation — the oldest release its features actually require, for the host-gateway sentinel behind proxy support — and a daemon older than that is refused with a clear error naming both its version and the one required, rather than some later request failing for an unexplained reason. Check yours with docker version --format '{{.Server.APIVersion}}' (API 1.41 corresponds to Docker 20.10).

Build from source

Clone the repository, then build a release binary. The workspace has two binary crates (see Roadmap) — ratect-compat is the one that implements Batect-compatible behavior today:

git clone https://github.com/or1can/ratect.git
cd ratect
cargo build --release -p ratect-compat

The compiled binary will be at target/release/ratect-compat.

Install the binary onto your PATH

To make ratect-compat available as a regular command:

cargo install --path ratect-compat

This installs to ~/.cargo/bin (assumed to already be on your PATH, which is the default for a standard rustup install).

Verify the install

ratect-compat --version
ratect-compat --help

Development builds

If you’re working on Ratect itself rather than just using it, a debug build is faster to compile and sufficient for local testing:

cargo build --workspace
cargo run -p ratect-compat -- --list-tasks

See AGENTS.md for the full contributor-facing tooling setup (formatting, linting, tests, coverage, dependency auditing).