Building from Source

Prerequisites

  • Rust (stable, with wasm32-wasip1 target): rustup target add wasm32-wasip1

  • Go 1.22 or later

  • Zellij 0.40 or later (for testing)

  • make

Quick Build

# Build everything (WASM plugin + Go CLI)
make build

# Install the plugin into Zellij
make install

Build Targets

Target Description

make build

Build release WASM + Go CLI

make build-wasm

Build WASM plugin only (release mode)

make build-wasm-debug

Build WASM plugin in debug mode (faster)

make build-cli

Build Go CLI only (requires WASM binary)

make cross-cli

Cross-compile CLI for linux/amd64 and linux/arm64

make install

Build and install plugin into Zellij

make test

Run all tests (Go + Rust)

make lint

Run all linters (go vet + clippy)

make clean

Remove all build artifacts

Development Workflow

For rapid iteration on the plugin:

# Build debug WASM and install to Zellij plugins dir
make dev

# After changing Rust code, hot-reload without restarting Zellij
make reload
Always kill existing Zellij sessions after installing a new WASM binary. Running sessions keep the old plugin in memory. 
zellij kill-all-sessions -y
zellij --layout cc-deck

Testing

# Run all tests
make test

# Go tests only
make test-go

# Rust tests only (native, not WASM)
make test-rust

# Linting
make lint

The Rust tests run natively (not on wasm32-wasip1) since the Zellij plugin SDK is not available in the test environment.

Container Image Targets

# Build the base image
make base-image

# Build for testing (build + cross-compile + init test dir)
make test-image

# Override the registry
make build-cli REGISTRY=quay.io/myorg