Installing Pony
April 29, 2026 · View on GitHub
Prebuilt Pony binaries are available on a number of platforms. They are built using a very generic CPU instruction set and as such, will not provide maximum performance. If you need to get the best performance possible from your Pony program, we strongly recommend building from source.
Linux
Prebuilt Linux packages are available via ponyup for Glibc and musl libc based Linux distribution. You can install nightly builds as well as official releases using ponyup.
If you are running on a supported Linux platform, ponyup should correctly select it so long as you have cc and lsb_release installed.
If we aren't creating packages for your distribution and you would like us to, please stop by the release stream in the ponylang Zulip to discuss adding support. Please note, we are almost assuredly going to ask you to help support your distribution.
At the moment, we support all supported LTS Ubuntu versions and any distributions built on top of Ubuntu (like Linux Mint and Pop!_OS). Additionally, we support recent Alpine Linux releases.
Install the latest release
ponyup update ponyc release
Linux additional requirements
Install your distribution's libc development package — for example libc6-dev on Debian/Ubuntu-based systems or musl-dev on Alpine. Installing a C compiler package also works since it pulls these in as dependencies.
ponyc bundles its own linker, so you don't need a C or C++ compiler. What it links against is the system C library and the standard CRT startup objects from your libc-dev package.
macOS
Prebuilt macOS packages are available for macOS via ponyup. You can also install nightly builds using ponyup.
To install the most recent ponyc on macOS:
ponyup update ponyc release
macOS additional requirements
ponyc bundles its own linker but uses the macOS SDK that ships with the Xcode Command Line Tools to find the system libraries it links your program against. If you don't already have them installed, run:
xcode-select --install
The full Xcode install also satisfies this requirement.
Windows
To use ponyc on Windows, install one of:
When installing either, select the Desktop Development with C++ workload along with the latest Windows 11 SDK (11.x.x.x) for Desktop individual component. ponyc bundles its own linker but links your program against the Windows SDK (UCRT, kernel32) and MSVC runtime libraries from this install.
Once you have installed the prerequisites, you can get prebuilt release or nightly builds via ponyup. To install the most recent ponyc on Windows:
ponyup update ponyc release
You can also download the latest ponyc release from Cloudsmith. Unzip the release file in a convenient location, and you will find ponyc.exe in the bin directory. Following extraction, to make ponyc.exe globally available, add it to your PATH either by using Advanced System Settings->Environment Variables to extend PATH or by using the setx command, e.g. setx PATH "%PATH%;<directory you unzipped to>\bin"