Install the prerelease

v5 prereleases ship for Apple Silicon macOS as immutable 5.0.0-next.N bundles. The shell bootstrap on each release installs a standalone manager and the selected bundle into a private ~/.hack-next channel. It does not replace Homebrew hack, edit your PATH or shell profile, convert projects, move volumes, enable DNS or trust, or start a VM. Install has the download and run steps.

Run the candidate explicitly:

"$HOME/.hack-next/bin/hack-next" --version
"$HOME/.hack-next/bin/hack-next" ps --path /absolute/project

Backends and homesCopy Anchor Link

hack-next selects the native backend by default, with version-private native and CLI homes, so candidate state never mixes with stable state. Set HACK_RUNTIME_BACKEND=compose to run the same verified bundle on Compose against your ordinary Hack home. Any other value refuses before the candidate starts.

On Compose, stable hack and the candidate share project and configuration state. Never run both at once against the same home, including their daemons. Before a Compose run: hack global up, any stable hack doctor or hack doctor --fix, then hack daemon stop, and confirm pgrep -fl "hack daemon start" prints nothing.

Upgrade and roll backCopy Anchor Link

Each release is a new immutable version directory with its own homes. Selecting a different retained bundle switches software, not data: an older candidate that refuses state written by a newer one is not a successful rollback. Stop and verify ownership of active workloads before changing versions, and keep stable v4 available until each project's own workflow passes on the candidate.

Every invocation re-verifies the retained bundle bytes, receipts and macOS code signatures and refuses on any mismatch. The prerelease channel guide covers versioning, platform support and publication gates in full.

Source: v5 (next.12) · docs/site/native/install.md.