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Edited 5/17/2026

Installation

Hardware Requirements

Although games built with Borger are very small and efficient, running 2 rustc instances and rust-analyzer at the same time during development is absolutely brutal. At bare minimum, you will need at least 10GB of available disk storage, and if using rust-analyzer, at least 12GB of total RAM .

Borger itself was written on a 2014 Dell Precision M2800 equipped with Xubuntu. If that clunker can run it, so can you!

Software Requirements

  • Bash: Required to run Borger’s CLI tool. Installing it depends on your operating system:
    • Linux: Usually already installed, depending on distro
    • macOS: Requires purchasing expensive, unrepairable, unupgradable hardware, but comes with Bash 3.2 (released in 2006) out of the box.
    • Windows: Requires Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), a mini Linux virtual machine. High risk of Windows Update forcing a reboot that deletes your unsaved work. It is also highly probable that Bill Gates performed unscrupulous activities with Jeffrey Epstein.
  • Curl: Command for downloading things, such as the CLI tool. Often already installed
  • Git: Used internally by the CLI tool to generate projects

More recommendations

  • Visual Studio Code - Technically any IDE will do the job (or even a plain text editor if you’re severely RAM-constrained), but Borger is preconfigured to work with VSCode. Here’s a good starter pack of optional extensions to install:
    • rust-analyzer - Makes an enormous difference in how easy it is to write Rust
    • Even Better TOML - Syntax highlighting for TOML files
    • CodeLLDB - For debugging the game server. Because game logic is shared between server and client, this is often easier than trying to debug Rust in-browser.
  • If you do find yourself needing to debug Rust with your preferred browser’s DevTools:
    • Chromium-based (Chrome, Brave, Edge, Opera, etc.)
    • Firefox - Unpleasant but surprisingly doable
    • Safari (lol)

Installing Borger

Open a terminal and run the command:

curl -fsSL https://eat.borger.dev | bash

This installs the latest borger CLI tool, as well as Rustup, Node.js, cargo-watch, and wasm-pack if they can’t be found. If asked upon completion, close and restart the terminal. Do note the security implications of downloading and installing several programs from the internet.