elan is a small tool for managing your installations of the Lean theorem prover. It places lean and leanpkg binaries in your PATH that automatically select and, if necessary, download the Lean version described in the lean_version field of your project's leanpkg.toml. You can also install, select, run, and uninstall Lean versions manually using the commands of the elan executable.

~/my/package $ cat leanpkg.toml | grep lean_version
lean_version = "nightly-2018-04-10"
~/my/package $ leanpkg -v
info: downloading component 'lean'
 14.6 MiB /  14.6 MiB (100 %)   2.2 MiB/s ETA:   0 s
info: installing component 'lean'
Lean package manager, version nightly-2018-04-10
[...]
~/my/package $ elan show
installed toolchains
--------------------
stable
nightly-2018-04-06
nightly-2018-04-10
master
active toolchain
----------------
nightly-2018-04-10 (overridden by '/home/me/my/package/leanpkg.toml')
Lean (version 3.3.1, nightly-2018-04-10, commit d36b859c6579, Release)

Linux/macOS/Cygwin/MSYS2/git bash/...: run the following command in a terminal:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leanprover/elan/master/elan-init.sh -sSf | sh

M1 Mac:

Lean 4 has native macOS/aarch64 releases (nightly only so far) that you can install as above by choosing the leanprover/lean4:nightly toolchain. For Lean 3, you need to run the installer under Rosetta (install using softwareupdate --install-rosetta if you haven't already done so) because there are no M1 releases for it right now:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leanprover/elan/master/elan-init.sh -sSf | arch -x86_64 sh

Windows: run the following commands in a terminal:

curl -O --location https://raw.githubusercontent.com/leanprover/elan/master/elan-init.ps1
powershell -f elan-init.ps1
del elan-init.ps1

Alternatively, on any supported platform: Grab the latest release for your platform, unpack it, and run the contained installation program.

The installation will tell you where it will install elan to (~/.elan by default), and also ask you about editing your shell config to extend PATH. elan can be uninstalled via elan self uninstall, which should revert these changes.

$ brew install elan-init

There are currently no M1 releases for elan on Homebrew; use the manual installation above instead.

$ nix-env -iA nixpkgs.elan

On some systems, lean/leanpkg will not work out of the box even if installed through elan:

• You'll need git to download dependencies through leanpkg.
• macOS: Install Homebrew, then run brew install gmp coreutils. (gmp is required by lean, coreutils is required by leanpkg)

elan is basically a fork of rustup. Apart from new features and adaptions to the Lean infrastructure, these are the basic changes to the original code:

• Replaced every mention of rustup with elan, cargo with leanpkg, and rust(c) with lean
• Merged CARGO_HOME and RUSTUP_HOME
• Removed options to configure host triple

If you want to build elan from source, you will need to install Rust and Cargo and run the following:

cargo build

The built binaries will show up in target/debug folder. You can test that it works by running the following:

./target/debug/elan --help

The windows build requires a 64bit developer command prompt and a windows version of perl.exe which you can download from https://strawberryperl.com/. Make sure this downloaded perl.exe is the first thing in your PATH so that the build does not try and use c:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\perl.exe. The git provided version of perl doesn't work for some reason.

Then you can run cargo build as shown above.