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.

Tip

After installing the Wails CLI, you can run wails3 setup to automatically check and help install these dependencies.

Go (At least 1.24)

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 gtk4 and webkitgtk-6.0. Run wails3 doctor after installation to be shown how to install the dependencies. The legacy GTK3 / WebKit2GTK 4.1 stack is still available via -tags gtk3 (see Linux Packaging - Legacy GTK3 Support) until v3.1. 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
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.

Next Steps

After installing the CLI, run the setup wizard to configure your development environment:

wails3 setup

Experimental

The setup wizard is new and primarily tested on Linux. If you encounter issues, please report them and use the manual dependency installation steps below.

The setup wizard will:

• Check and help install platform dependencies
• Configure project defaults (author info, bundle ID prefix)
• Optionally set up Docker for cross-platform builds
• Configure code signing (if needed)

See the Setup Guide for more details.

Manual Dependency Installation

If you prefer to install dependencies manually, or if the setup wizard doesn’t work on your system, follow the platform-specific instructions above and then run:

wails3 doctor

This will check if you have the correct dependencies installed and advise on what is missing.

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.