Installation

sqzass is a single binary with no runtime dependencies. No Node, no Python, no system libraries.

One line#

curl -fsSL https://sqzass.sqzer.com/install.sh | sh

The script does exactly four things, and you can read it first: detect the platform (Linux on x86_64 or ARM64, or Apple-silicon macOS), download the latest release tarball with its .sha256, verify the checksum, and install the binary into /usr/local/bin — asking for sudo only if that directory is not writable. Set SQZASS_INSTALL_DIR to install somewhere else. It touches nothing else: no shell config, no PATH edits.

With Cargo#

If you already have Rust, one line builds it from source:

cargo install --git https://github.com/sqzer-x/sqzass

Arch Linux#

sqzass is in the AUR, built from the release tag:

yay -S sqzass          # or paru, or makepkg -si on a clone

There is no sqzass-bin. Building a Rust tool from source is normal on Arch, and two packages would only raise the question of which one is current.

With a coding agent#

Paste this at an agent and it has enough to finish without guessing:

Set up sqzass in this project.
Read https://sqzass.sqzer.com/agent.md first — it covers the install (sqzass is
not on crates.io), the TOML front matter, how @/ links resolve, and the error
identifiers to match on.

/agent.md is the long version: the same install commands, the rules that are not guessable from a file tree, and the exit-code table. It exists because an agent asked to "add a static site generator" will otherwise reach for cargo install sqzass, which fails — sqzass is installed from git or a release tarball.

From source#

git clone https://github.com/sqzer-x/sqzass
cd sqzass
cargo build --release

The binary lands at target/release/sqzass.

Requirements#

Requirement	Version
Rust	1.97 or newer
A C compiler	rustc drives the linker with it; the default build also compiles Oniguruma, the highlighter's regex engine, with it.
Everything else	—

The exact configuration the static release ships — the pure-Rust regex engine, no C source compiled — is a feature flag away:

cargo build --release --no-default-features --features pure-rust

Prebuilt binaries#

Attached to each release: two statically linked Linux builds, x86_64-unknown-linux-musl and aarch64-unknown-linux-musl, and an aarch64-apple-darwin one, each with a .sha256 beside it.

curl -LO https://github.com/sqzer-x/sqzass/releases/latest/download/sqzass-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
tar xzf sqzass-x86_64-unknown-linux-musl.tar.gz
sudo install -m755 sqzass-*/sqzass /usr/local/bin/

The Linux builds are static, so they have no glibc requirement and run on distributions older than the one they were built on — which is also why one tarball covers Debian, Fedora and Arch alike. They are the builds that use the pure-Rust regex engine: everywhere else sqzass highlights with Oniguruma, which is measurably faster on code-heavy sites, but Oniguruma is a C binding and a C binding is exactly what breaks a musl static build. The engines' grammar sets are not identical either: the pure-Rust engine cannot run a few grammars' regexes, so the static artifacts drop seven of them entirely — PowerShell, JavaScript (Babel), Salt State and ARM Assembly among them. A ```powershell or ```jsx fence that a native build highlights in full falls back to plain text there, without an error. Even ```js differs in markup structure: the native build resolves it to the Babel grammar, the static ones to plain JavaScript. Each binary is still fully deterministic on its own.

Checking the install#

sqzass --version

Next: Your first site.