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Installing the circom ecosystem

⚠ Important deprecation note

The old circom compiler written in Javascript will be frozen, but it can still be downloaded from the old circom repository.

Installing dependencies

You need several dependencies in your system to run circom and its associated tools.

  • The core tool is the circom compiler which is written in Rust. To have Rust available in your system, you can install rustup. If you’re using Linux or macOS, open a terminal and enter the following command:
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 https://sh.rustup.rs -sSf | sh

You also need to have installed some tools to build from sources. In Linux systems, these tools can be found in the packages cmake (> 3.16) and build-essential.

  • We also distribute a series of npm packages so Node.js and some package manager like npm or yarn should be available in your system. Recent versions of Node.js include big integer support and web assembly compilers that help run code faster, so to get a better performance, install version 10 or higher.

Installing circom

To install from our sources, clone the circom repository: 

git clone https://github.com/iden3/circom.git

Enter the circom directory and use the cargo build to compile:

cargo build --release

The installation takes around 3 minutes to be completed. When the command successfully finishes, it generates the circom binary in the directory target/release. You can install this binary as follows:

cargo install --path circom

The previous command will install the circom binary in the directory $HOME/.cargo/bin.

Now, you should be able to see all the options of the executable by using the help flag:

circom --help

   Circom Compiler 2.0.0
   IDEN3
   Compiler for the Circom programming language

   USAGE:
      circom [FLAGS] [OPTIONS] [input]

   FLAGS:
      -h, --help       Prints help information
         --inspect    Does an additional check over the constraints produced
         --O0         No simplification is applied
      -c, --c          Compiles the circuit to c
         --json       outputs the constraints in json format
         --r1cs       outputs the constraints in r1cs format
         --sym        outputs witness in sym format
         --wasm       Compiles the circuit to wasm
         --wat        Compiles the circuit to wat
         --O1         Only applies var to var and var to constant simplification
      -V, --version    Prints version information

   OPTIONS:
         --O2 <full_simplification>    Full constraint simplification [default: full]
      -o, --output <output>             Path to the directory where the output will be written [default: .]

   ARGS:
      <input>    Path to a circuit with a main component [default: ./circuit.circom]

Installing snarkjs

snarkjs is a npm package that contains code to generate and validate ZK proofs from the artifacts produced by circom.

You can install snarkjs with the following command:

npm install -g snarkjs