clarify error: "unable to find zig installation directory: FileNotFound"

[godalming123]

Zig Version

0.12.0-dev.494+a8d2ed806

Steps to Reproduce and Observed Output

1. Download the latest nightly .tar.xz file binary for linux
2. Copy the zig binary from that tarball to /bin/
3. Attempt to run it in a terminal
4. Witness the errror

Expected Output

The error should describe what you need to put where, something like: "Please place the lib directory from the zig extracted source code into /bin" (Or replace /bin with wherever that directory is recommended to go to fix the error - I could make it work by copying all the files in it to /lib)

[slonik-az]

The following worked for me OK:

1. Unpack the tar file somewhere.
2. symlink the zig executable to a bin/ directory in my path.

[godalming123]

I can get zig to work fine, it's just that this is not the best error message for new users

[squeek502]

The relevant information is in the GitHub readme:

A Zig installation is composed of two things:

1. The Zig executable
2. The lib/ directory

At runtime, the executable searches up the file system for the lib/ directory, relative to itself:

• lib/
• lib/zig/
• ../lib/
• ../lib/zig/
• (and so on)

In other words, you can unpack a release of Zig anywhere, and then begin using it immediately. There is no need to install it globally, although this mechanism supports that use case too (i.e. /usr/bin/zig and /usr/lib/zig/).

The 'Getting started' section of the website doesn't have the same level of detail:

Direct download

This is the most straight-forward way of obtaining Zig: grab a Zig bundle for your platform from the Downloads page, extract it in a directory and add it to your PATH to be able to call zig from any location.

[nathany]

Also ran into this FileNotFound error when building from source and then copying the binary to my ~/bin folder on macOS.

This produces stage3/bin/zig which is the Zig compiler built by itself. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Building-Zig-From-Source#for-macos--homebrew

Copying the stage3/lib folder over got it working. Agreed that the error message could be better. Thanks.

[timblaktu]

Same as @nathany here, after building from source on Debian and using /usr/local instead of ~/, I had to sudo cp -ar build/stage3/lib/zig /usr/local/lib/ as well as sudo cp -a build/stage3/bin/zig /usr/local/bin/. I added some language in the "build from source" wiki page to describe the need to copy the lib folder as well as the zig compiler binary onto your path.

[tanner49]

Is there a reason we couldn't add a more descriptive error here? Pretty simple once you figure it out, but comes up even when you're working from pre-built -- I unzipped and accidentally separated the binaries and lib. Yes, it's in the documentation, but could save a lot of people 20 minutes to have a more descriptive error.