Installation

Every release on the releases page ships the same build several ways:

An installer — .pkg on macOS, setup.exe on Windows, .deb on Debian and Ubuntu. Each one puts anistream on your PATH and adds a launcher, so you can type it or click it. The launcher opens your terminal, since that is where anistream lives.

An AppImage — for every other Linux distro: chmod +x it and run it from a terminal. Nothing is installed.

An archive — .tar.gz or .zip holding just the binary, for putting on PATH yourself.

Everything ships with a .sha256 worth checking first.

mpv and ffmpeg are not bundled. anistream drives mpv for playback and shells out to ffmpeg when muxing subtitles into a completed download. The .deb declares both as dependencies; on macOS and Windows, install them yourself — see Prerequisites below.

There is no Homebrew formula and no cargo install yet. To build from source instead, install the prerequisites and then build.

Updating

anistream --update

That downloads the latest release for your platform, verifies it against the published SHA-256, and replaces the binary in place — restart anistream to use it. The app also checks GitHub for a new release once a day (one cached HTTPS request, nothing downloaded) and mentions it in a toast. Turn the check off with:

[updates]
check = false

Prerequisites

brew install mpv ffmpeg cmake
rustup toolchain install 1.97.1    # pinned by rust-toolchain.toml

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install mpv ffmpeg cmake build-essential pkg-config

# Fedora
sudo dnf install mpv ffmpeg cmake gcc-c++

# Arch
sudo pacman -S mpv ffmpeg cmake base-devel

Install Rust from rustup.rs if it is not already there. The toolchain version comes from rust-toolchain.toml.

winget install --id Rustlang.Rustup
winget install --id Kitware.CMake
winget install --id NASM.NASM
winget install --id Gyan.FFmpeg
winget install --id shinchiro.mpv
winget install --id Microsoft.VisualStudio.2022.BuildTools

The Visual Studio installer needs the Desktop development with C++ workload — the bare package does not include the C compiler on its own. NASM is there because the torrent stack’s crypto assembles its own primitives on Windows.

Open a new terminal afterwards so the PATH changes apply, and check that mpv and ffmpeg resolve. Some winget packages install the binary without adding it to PATH, and anistream looks for both there.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/bitknox/anistream
cd anistream
cargo run --release

The first build is slow — BoringSSL, librqbit and a WASM runtime are in the tree — and incremental after that. The binary ends up at target/release/anistream if you want it on your PATH.

Where things live


Config	`~/Library/Application Support/anistream/config.toml`
History database	`~/Library/Application Support/anistream/anistream.db`
Plugins	`~/Library/Application Support/anistream/plugins/*.wasm`
Logs	`~/Library/Caches/anistream/logs/`


Config	`~/.config/anistream/config.toml`
History database	`~/.local/share/anistream/anistream.db`
Plugins	`~/.config/anistream/plugins/*.wasm`
Logs	`~/.cache/anistream/logs/`


Config	`%APPDATA%\anistream\config\config.toml`
History database	`%APPDATA%\anistream\data\anistream.db`
Plugins	`%APPDATA%\anistream\config\plugins\*.wasm`
Logs	`%LOCALAPPDATA%\anistream\cache\logs\`

Plugins always sit beside config.toml, whatever that path is — anistream --plugins prints the directory it is actually reading. Logs roll daily, at info unless ANISTREAM_LOG says otherwise.

No config file is required — one is only written when you change something in the Settings screen, and those writes are format-preserving, so comments you add by hand survive.