Installation And CLI

Vela is currently used from the source repository. Public package installation and bytecode artifact distribution are not stable release surfaces yet.

Requirements

You need a recent Rust toolchain with Cargo. The website also uses Node and npm, but those are only needed when working on the documentation site.

Clone the repository and validate the workspace:

cargo fmt --all -- --check
cargo test --workspace

CLI Usage

The CLI can run a .vela source file through the local workspace binary:

cargo run -p vela_cli -- path/to/script.vela

The CLI is useful for direct script execution and smoke checks. Most production-style usage embeds Vela through vela_engine so the host can register types, functions, capabilities, budgets, extern state, and hot reload policy.

Examples And Site

Runnable embedding examples live under examples/src/bin:

cargo run -p vela_examples --bin modules
cargo run -p vela_examples --bin host_type_methods
cargo run --manifest-path examples/Cargo.toml --bin script_state

To work on the documentation site:

cd site
npm ci
npm run dev

The site build expects generated playground WASM assets in release workflows. Local documentation-only edits can still use npm run build once dependencies are installed.