Installation

Prerequisites

Plinth builds with Nix flakes. You need:

Nix (2.18+) with experimental-features = nix-command flakes
Or: Rust nightly, wasm32-unknown-unknown target, cargo-leptos, tailwindcss, wasm-bindgen-cli, binaryen

The recommended approach is Nix — it handles the entire toolchain.

Clone and enter dev shell

git clone https://codeberg.org/caniko/plinth.git
cd plinth
nix develop

This drops you into a shell with Rust nightly, cargo-leptos, PostgreSQL 16 with pgvector, Tailwind CSS, and all native dependencies (OpenSSL, ONNX Runtime, libclang).

Build for production

nix build .#plinth

The output is in result/:

result/bin/plinth-server — server binary (wrapper that sets LEPTOS_SITE_ROOT)
result/site/ — compiled WASM, JS, CSS, and static assets
result/share/plinth/plinth.toml — example configuration

Build variants

Command	Profile	Use case
`nix build .#plinth`	Release (opt-level 3)	Production deployment
`nix build .#plinth-dev`	Debug	Fast compile, debugging
`nix build .#plinth-minimal`	Release (opt-level z)	Minimal binary size

Run locally

# Start the development server with hot reload
cargo leptos watch

The server starts at http://127.0.0.1:3000 by default. For local database setup, run ./scripts/dev-db.sh start inside nix develop.