Install cheadergen

cheadergen ships as a single binary called cheadergen. Since cheadergen relies on rustdoc-json for header generation, it requires a specific nightly toolchain to be installed via rustup.

Pick whichever installation method fits your environment best.

Prebuilt binaries

On macOS or Linux:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf \
  https://github.com/LukeMathWalker/cheadergen/releases/download/0.2.4/cheadergen_cli-installer.sh \
  | sh

The installer downloads the prebuilt binary for your platform and drops it into ~/.cargo/bin (or, if Cargo isn’t installed, ~/.local/bin).

On Windows, via Powershell:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -c "irm https://github.com/LukeMathWalker/cheadergen/releases/download/0.2.4/cheadergen_cli-installer.ps1 | iex"

Installers download prebuilt binaries from our GitHub releases. Each archive ships with a sibling .sha256 file you can use to verify the download.

From crates.io

cargo install --locked cheadergen_cli

cheadergen_cli is the binary crate; the installed executable is named cheadergen. If you have cargo-binstall it will fetch the prebuilt artifacts:

cargo binstall cheadergen_cli

Nightly toolchain

cheadergen invokes cargo doc --output-format=json, which is only available on nightly. You don’t need to make nightly your default toolchain: cheadergen calls a pinned nightly via cargo +<toolchain>.

If the pinned nightly isn’t installed when cheadergen runs, header generation will fail with an error that explains how to install the missing toolchain.

If you want to install it eagerly, run:

rustup install nightly-2026-06-04 -c rust-docs-json

Verify the install

cheadergen --help
cheadergen generate --help

Both commands should print usage information without errors. You’re ready for the Quickstart.