Installing Sunspot

June 19, 2026 · View on GitHub

Sunspot can be installed either from a prebuilt release artifact or from source. In both cases, you will also need to point Sunspot to the verifier-bin crate if you intend to deploy on Solana.

Prerequisites

  • Solana tools — required for deployment on Solana.
  • Go 1.24+ — required only if you are building from source.

Install from a release

Prebuilt artifacts are published on the Sunspot releases page. Each release contains:

  • sunspot_<version>_<os>_<arch>.tar.gz — archives for Linux and macOS on amd64 and arm64 architectures.
  • sunspot_<version>_<arch>.deb — Debian/Ubuntu packages.
  • sunspot_<version>_<arch>.rpm — Fedora/RHEL packages.
  • checksums.txt — SHA-256 checksums for every artifact in the release.

macOS / Linux (tar.gz)

  1. Download the archive matching your OS and architecture from the releases page.

  2. Extract it and move the binary somewhere on your PATH:

    tar -xzf sunspot_<version>_<os>_<arch>.tar.gz
sudo mv sunspot /usr/local/bin/

  3. On macOS, the binary is unsigned. The first time you run it you may need to allow it under System Settings → Privacy & Security, or remove the quarantine attribute:

    xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /usr/local/bin/sunspot

Debian / Ubuntu (.deb)

sudo dpkg -i sunspot_<version>_<arch>.deb

This installs the binary to /usr/bin/sunspot.

Fedora / RHEL (.rpm)

sudo rpm -i sunspot_<version>_<arch>.rpm

This installs the binary to /usr/bin/sunspot.

Verify the installation

sunspot --help

Install from source

# Clone the repository
git clone git@github.com:reilabs/sunspot.git
cd sunspot/go

# Build the binary
go build -o sunspot ./cmd/sunspot

Add the binary to your PATH

You can move the binary to a directory already in your PATH (easiest):

sudo mv sunspot /usr/local/bin/

Alternatively, create a bin folder in your home directory and add it to your PATH:

mkdir -p ~/bin
mv sunspot ~/bin/

Then add this line to your shell configuration file:

  • For bash:

    echo 'export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile

  • For zsh (default on macOS):

    echo 'export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

Now you can run sunspot from anywhere:

sunspot --help

Configure GNARK_VERIFIER_BIN

GNARK_VERIFIER_BIN must point to the verifier-bin crate directory in order for sunspot deploy to work. The release artifacts only ship the sunspot binary, so you will need a clone of this repository for the verifier crate regardless of how you installed Sunspot:

git clone git@github.com:reilabs/sunspot.git
export GNARK_VERIFIER_BIN=/path/to/sunspot/gnark-solana/crates/verifier-bin

To persist the setting, add the export line to your shell configuration file:

  • bash (Linux): ~/.bashrc
  • bash (macOS): ~/.bash_profile
  • zsh: ~/.zshrc

After editing, reload your shell:

source ~/.bashrc       # or ~/.bash_profile, ~/.zshrc depending on your shell

GNARK_VERIFIER_BIN will now be available in all future terminal sessions.