Urbit

Urbit is a personal server stack built from scratch. It has an identity layer (Azimuth), virtual machine (Vere), and operating system (Arvo).

A running Urbit "ship" is designed to operate with other ships peer-to-peer. Urbit is a general-purpose, peer-to-peer computer and network.

This repository contains:

• The Arvo OS
• herb, a tool for Unix control of an Urbit ship
• Source code for Landscape's web interface
• Source code for the vere virtual machine.

For more on the identity layer, see Azimuth. To manage your Urbit identity, use Bridge.

Install

To install and run Urbit, please follow the instructions at urbit.org/install. You'll be on the live network in a few minutes.

If you're interested in Urbit development, keep reading.

Development

Urbit uses Nix to manage builds. On Linux and macOS you can install Nix via:

curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install | sh

You can optionally setup Nix to pull build artefacts from the binary cache that continuous integration uses. This will improve build times and avoid unnecessary recompilations of common dependencies. Once Nix has been installed you can setup Cachix via:

nix-env -iA cachix -f https://cachix.org/api/v1/install
cachix use ares

The Makefile in the project's root directory contains useful phony targets for building, installing, testing, and so on. You can use it to avoid dealing with Nix explicitly.

To build the Urbit virtual machine binary, for example, use:

make build

The test suite can similarly be run via a simple:

make test

Note that some of the Makefile targets need access to pills tracked via git LFS, so you'll also need to have those available locally:

git lfs install
git lfs pull

Contributing

Contributions of any form are more than welcome! Please take a look at our contributing guidelines for details on our git practices, coding styles, how we manage issues, and so on.

For instructions on contributing to Landscape, see its guidelines.

You might also be interested in joining the urbit-dev mailing list.