<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.
• Show you how to set up your project for verification with Paralegal.
• Explore an example policy to teach you the concepts you need to know for reading, understanding and writing Paralegal policies.

This guide explains the basics in so far 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)