The best way to get started with the Reticulum Network Stack depends on what you want to do. This guide will outline sensible starting paths for different scenarios.

If you simply want to install Reticulum and related utilities on a system, the easiest way is via the pip package manager:

pip install rns

If you do not already have pip installed, you can install it using the package manager of your system with a command like sudo apt install python3-pip, sudo pamac install python-pip or similar.

You can also dowload the Reticulum release wheels from GitHub, or other release channels, and install them offline using pip:

pip install ./rns-1.1.2-py3-none-any.whl

On platforms that limit user package installation via pip, you may need to manually allow this using the --break-system-packages command line flag when installing. This will not actually break any packages, unless you have installed Reticulum directly via your operating system’s package manager.

pip install rns --break-system-packages

For more detailed installation instructions, please see the Platform-Specific Install Notes section.

After installation is complete, it might be helpful to refer to the Using Reticulum on Your System chapter.

On some platforms, there may not be binary packages available for all dependencies, and pip installation may fail with an error message. In these cases, the issue can usually be resolved by installing the development essentials packages for your platform:

# Debian / Ubuntu / Derivatives

sudo apt install build-essential

# Arch / Manjaro / Derivatives

sudo pamac install base-devel

# Fedora

sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools" "Development Libraries"

With the base development packages installed, pip should be able to compile any missing dependencies from source, and complete installation even on platforms that don’t have pre-compiled packages available.

If you simply want to try using a program built with Reticulum, a range of different programs exist that allow basic communication and a various other useful functions, even over extremely low-bandwidth Reticulum networks.

Reticulum comes with a range of included utilities that make it easier to manage your network, check connectivity and make Reticulum available to other programs on your system.

You can use rnsd to run Reticulum as a background or foreground service, and the rnstatus, rnpath and rnprobe utilities to view and query network status and connectivity.

To learn more about these utility programs, have a look at the Using Reticulum on Your System chapter of this manual.

To create a network, you will need to specify one or more interfaces for Reticulum to use. This is done in the Reticulum configuration file, which by default is located at ~/.reticulum/config. You can get an example configuration file with all options via rnsd --exampleconfig.