<aside> 💡 If you encounter any issues with this setup please open an issue in GitHub with the documentation label.

</aside>

This is an opinionated “probably what you want” guide for getting started with Paralegal. It will take you through:

• Installing the Paralegal library and rustc plugin.
• Setting up your project for verification with Paralegal.
• Teaching you the concepts you need to know for reading, understanding and writing Paralegal policies, with a running example policy.

This guide explains the basics insofar as they are necessary for the example policy. For advanced use cases and comprehensive documentation, see: Documentation by Topic. Each section in this guide also links to further reading in the detailed documentation.

Installation

Compatibility: Paralegal has been tested on Linux (Ubuntu), MacOS and WSL. It should also work on Windows though.

Prerequisites: Paralegal requires that you have installed rustup and that the directory in which cargo installs binaries is on your PATH.

Start by cloning the https://github.com/brownsys/dfpp repository.

git clone <https://github.com/brownsys/paralegal>

Change into the cloned directory and install the cargo and rustc plugins

cd paralegal
cargo install --locked --path crates/paralegal-flow

This installs the binaries cargo-paralegal-flow (wrapper for cargo), paralegal-flow (wrapper for rustc) and paralegal-compiler (high-level policy language compiler).

You can verify the binaries are available on the PATH by running the following command

cargo paralegal-flow --version

Which should output something like

paralegal-flow 0.0.1
built ...
commit ...
with rustc 1.85.0-nightly (0aeaa5eb2 2024-12-14)

Project Setup and Example