Installation

Supported Platforms

• Windows 10/11 AMD64/ARM64
• macOS 10.15+ AMD64 (Can deploy to macOS 10.13+)
• macOS 11.0+ ARM64
• Ubuntu 24.04 AMD64/ARM64 (other Linux may work too!)

Dependencies

Wails has a number of common dependencies that are required before installation:

Go (At least 1.23)

Download Go from the Go Downloads Page.

Ensure that you follow the official Go installation instructions. You will also need to ensure that your PATH environment variable also includes the path to your ~/go/bin directory. Restart your terminal and do the following checks:

• Check Go is installed correctly: go version
• Check ~/go/bin is in your PATH variable
  • Mac / Linux: echo $PATH | grep go/bin
  • Windows: $env:PATH -split ';' | Where-Object { $_ -like '*\go\bin' }

npm (Optional)

Although Wails doesn’t require npm to be installed, it is needed by most of the bundled templates.

Download the latest node installer from the Node Downloads Page. It is best to use the latest release as that is what we generally test against.

Run npm --version to verify.

Note

If you prefer a different package manager to npm, feel free to use it. You will need to update the project Taskfiles to use it.

Platform Specific Dependencies

You will also need to install platform specific dependencies:

Mac

Wails requires that the xcode command line tools are installed. This can be done by running:

xcode-select --install

Windows

Wails requires that the WebView2 Runtime is installed. Almost all Windows installations will already have this installed. You can check using the wails doctor command.

Linux

Linux requires the standard gcc build tools plus gtk3 and webkit2gtk. Run wails doctor after installation to be shown how to install the dependencies. If your distro/package manager is not supported, please let us know on discord.

Installation

To install the Wails CLI using Go Modules, run the following commands:

go install -v github.com/wailsapp/wails/v3/cmd/wails3@latest

If you would like to install the latest development version, run the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/wailsapp/wails.git
cd wails
git checkout v3-alpha
cd v3/cmd/wails3
go install

When using the development version, all generated projects will use Go’s replace directive to ensure projects use the development version of Wails.

System Check

Running wails3 doctor will check if you have the correct dependencies installed. If not, it will advise on what is missing and help on how to rectify any problems.

The wails3 command appears to be missing?

If your system is reporting that the wails3 command is missing, check the following:

• Make sure you have followed the above Go installation guide correctly and that the go/bin directory is in the PATH environment variable.
• Close/Reopen current terminals to pick up the new PATH variable.