01 — Install

The first step in the Get started tutorial sequence. After this page you will have pr4xis built locally and the test suite green.

Prerequisites

A Rust toolchain — version 1.85 or later, edition 2024. The simplest install is via rustup.
git.
About 1 GB of free disk space for the build artifacts (the target/ directory grows during compilation).

If you use Nix, the project ships with devenv configured. After cloning, devenv shell drops you into a fully-configured environment with the right Rust version, cargo-nextest, treefmt, and other dev tools already on the path. You do not need to install Rust separately.

Clone and build

git clone https://github.com/i-am-logger/pr4xis
cd pr4xis
cargo build --workspace

The first build pulls dependencies and compiles the seven workspace crates. Expect 2-5 minutes on a modern machine, longer on first run.

Verify with the test suite

cargo test --workspace

This runs the entire test suite — more than 7,000 tests across the workspace, including category laws, functor laws, axiom checks, and property-based tests via proptest. A release run on a multi-core machine takes a few minutes. You should see something like:

test result: ok. <N> passed; 0 failed; ...

If anything fails, that is the bug report. File an issue with the failing test name and your toolchain version. Pre-existing test failures are not normal — the workspace is meant to be green at every commit on master.

Optional: run the property-based tests with more iterations

The default proptest budget is 256 cases per property, which is enough for routine CI but may miss subtle counterexamples. To run with a larger budget:

PROPTEST_CASES=10000 cargo test --workspace

This is slower (5-10 minutes) but exercises a much wider input space. Use it before submitting a PR that touches reasoning-system code or category-law-checking infrastructure.

Fetch the WordNet data

The English ontology is built from a WordNet XML file that is not checked into the repository, so a fresh clone does not have it yet. The CLI in 02 — First Query needs it and will refuse to start without it. Fetch it once:

pr4xis update wordnet

If you use Nix, the dev-data dev script wraps the same pr4xis update step. The file lands at crates/domains/data/wordnet/english-wordnet-2025.xml; set WORDNET_XML if you keep it elsewhere.

What you have now

A working pr4xis workspace built from source
The full test suite passing
A target/ directory with the pr4xis-cli and pr4xis-web binaries
The full source for the domain ontologies under crates/domains/src/
The WordNet data fetched and ready for the CLI

Continue with 02 — First Query to interact with the engine, either through the CLI chatbot or the WASM browser demo.

Document date: 2026-04-14

Praxis Documentation