Installation

The recommended install path downloads a prebuilt tea release for x86_64 Linux or Apple Silicon macOS, verifies its checksum, and installs it to ~/.local/bin.

curl -fsSL https://tea-lang.dev/install | bash
tea --version

Tea also needs a local C toolchain to build executables while running scripts or tea build:

• Apple Silicon macOS: xcode-select --install
• Linux: install clang with your package manager

Intel Macs should build from source instead.

If you need a source build for local development, use the Rust/Bun/LLVM workflow instead:

git clone https://github.com/bentruyman/tea-lang.git
cd tea-lang
./scripts/setup-worktree.sh
cargo build --release
make install

make install builds a bundled tea binary for local use. If you only run cargo build --release -p tea-cli, that developer build still expects cargo to be available when Tea compiles programs.

If you’d rather skip the install step, you can run Tea directly from the repo during development:

cargo run -p tea-cli -- examples/echo/main.tea hello tea