== compiling and running veilid ==

I recently read about a new protocol called [[https://www.veilid.com|veilid]] and thought I could try that out, but it uses Rust which I have zero experience with. I have access to one machine with Debian 11 which has Rust but apparently not the current version, so the build didn't work.

To get it working, I used an Ubuntu machine (on a pubnix) which uses the nix package manager, that worked quite ok after a few tries.

The required tools are rust and cargo (the build tool for rust) and two dependencies for compiling which are protobuffers and capnproto. This can all be activated in nix with the nix-shell command which puts the tools into the necessary directories temporarily.

    nix-shell -p rustc cargo protobuf capnproto

the resulting subshell has the cargo tool available and can run the build tool.

First of all, the check out the sources, we use git

   git clone --recurse-submodules git@gitlab.com:veilid/veilid.git

This creates a few subdirs, for now I have compiled veilid-server and veilid-cli

   cargo build
can be run in the two dirs, this builds everything and finishes with a few warnings

the resulting executables end up in veilid/target/debug and can be run without the nix shell setup

    ~/veilid/target/debug/veilid-server

runs the server which just scrolls status messages all the time, the client can be started with

    ~/veilid/target/debug/veilid-cli

this connects to the server in localhost and shows some status messages at least, e.g. when running peerinfo

{{:rust:pasted:20230909-115135.png}}

So now I only have to figure out how to do anything useful