Install Bear

Install Bear with your platform's package manager:

# Debian / Ubuntu
sudo apt install bear

# Fedora
sudo dnf install bear

# Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S bear

# macOS (Homebrew)
brew install bear

# FreeBSD
pkg install bear

Then confirm it is on your PATH:

bear --version

Compare that version against the latest release. Distribution packages often lag several releases behind, so a problem you hit may already be fixed upstream; build the current release from source before reporting a bug. bear --help, or Command-line options, lists every flag once you have it installed.

For the full list of distributions that carry a Bear package, see the Repology page. Repology tracks the version each distribution ships; if yours lags behind, or does not package Bear at all, build it from source instead. Bear is not published on crates.io, so cargo install bear will not find it; cargo build --release plus the install script below is the source-build path.

Build from source

Follow INSTALL.md in the repository for prerequisites (the Rust toolchain and a C compiler) and the full steps. The short version:

cargo build --release
./scripts/install.sh

scripts/install.sh installs to /usr/local when run as root (for example under sudo), or $HOME/.local otherwise - a plain, unelevated run already gives you a working, no-sudo install. Override either default explicitly with PREFIX:

sudo PREFIX=/usr ./scripts/install.sh

`DESTDIR` for packaging, separately from `PREFIX`

scripts/install.sh accepts two different path variables, and they are not interchangeable. PREFIX is the final, on-system path; the bear entry script it installs embeds that path literally, so PREFIX must match where the package actually runs, not where it is being built. DESTDIR, when set, is a staging root prepended to every install path on top of PREFIX, for building a package without touching the real system; it must be an absolute path. Building a distribution package sets both together:

DESTDIR=/tmp/pkgroot PREFIX=/usr ./scripts/install.sh

`INTERCEPT_LIBDIR` must match between build and install

On systems that use lib64 or another non-default library directory name, set INTERCEPT_LIBDIR for both the build and the install step, so bear-driver finds the preload library where it actually ends up:

INTERCEPT_LIBDIR=lib64 cargo build --release
INTERCEPT_LIBDIR=lib64 ./scripts/install.sh

Let the two commands disagree and Bear still installs without complaint, but preload interception silently fails at runtime: the dynamic linker cannot find the library at the path bear-driver expects, so it skips loading it and lets the build run anyway. Nothing about that failure is loud - the build succeeds, Bear exits 0, and the only symptom is a compile_commands.json that came out empty or suspiciously short, because a missing preload library is not one of the failures Bear itself reports (see Exit status). Bear on Linux has the matching commands for the common lib64 case.

Platform-specific notes

A distribution package or a source build both give you a working bear, but a few platforms have their own constraints on how Bear intercepts a build:

Next steps

Once bear --version works, follow Getting started with Bear for the first real run, or jump straight to a recipe for your build system.

Debian / Ubuntu