For developers

arcsec is written in Rust and is open source under the MIT licence. This page covers what you need beyond the ready-made downloads.

Install with cargo

With Rust 1.96 or newer, this builds and installs arcsec on any platform Rust supports, including Intel Macs:

cargo install arcsec

The program lands in ~/.cargo/bin (on Windows, %USERPROFILE%\.cargo\bin).

Building needs a C compiler (cc on Linux and macOS, the MSVC build tools on Windows) for one dependency, ring, which provides the HTTPS that arcsec catalog install downloads over. Nothing else: FITS support is built in, so no system CFITSIO library is needed.

Build from source

git clone https://github.com/cruzzil/arcsec
cd arcsec
cargo build --release          # binary at target/release/arcsec

Verify a download

Each release archive has a SHA-256 checksum file, and SHA256SUMS lists them all:

Latest release: arcsec 0.4.0, published 2026-10-02.

Platform	Archive	Size	SHA-256
Windows (x86-64)	arcsec-v0.4.0-x86_64-pc-windows-msvc.zipDownload .zip	3.3 MB	.sha256
macOS (Apple silicon)	arcsec-v0.4.0-aarch64-apple-darwin.tar.gzDownload .tar.gz	3.3 MB	.sha256
Linux (x86-64)	arcsec-v0.4.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gzDownload .tar.gz	3.8 MB	.sha256
Linux (arm64)	arcsec-v0.4.0-aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gzDownload .tar.gz	3.6 MB	.sha256

All checksums in one file: SHA256SUMS.

Linux: sha256sum -c <file>.sha256
macOS: shasum -a 256 -c <file>.sha256
Windows: run Get-FileHash <file> in PowerShell and compare the hash with the .sha256 file’s contents.

Each archive also carries a signed build attestation from the GitHub Actions run that built it, which the GitHub CLI checks:

gh attestation verify <file> -R cruzzil/arcsec

The arcsec-core library

The solving code is published separately as arcsec-core, for use from other Rust programs. Its API documentation is on docs.rs.