Quick Start (Windows)

This guide is a concise list of steps to get started building with Conformal. For a more detailed walkthrough on building a plug-in, see the first plug-in tutorial.

Creating your first project

Install `bun`

bun is the TypeScript runtime we use for all build tooling in Conformal. Follow installation instructions on the bun website

Install the VST SDK (Optional)

While the VST SDK is not required to build plug-ins, it can be used to validate plug-in correctness. Download it from the website and extract the zip. You can put it wherever you want, but below we assume you extracted it to the %USERPROFILE%\SDKs folder, so the sdk will live in %USERPROFILE%\SDKs\VST_SDK\vst3sdk

Create a new project


bun create conformal my_project

This will prompt you for a few questions to set up your project.

Setting up development environment

We have a few steps that are required to set up your development environment. The following commands should be run from the project directory.

First, if you installed the sdk, run (replace the path with the path where you extracted the SDK)


echo "VST3_SDK_DIR=%USERPROFILE%/SDKs/vst3sdk" > .env

Finally, install the development environment with:


bun install
bun run bootstrap

Note that these scripts may prompt you to take some manual steps to install additional software.

Building the project


bun run package