How to setup and use Rojo!

Midnightific · July 9, 2025, 4:04pm

Preamble

Hi! It’s been over 2 years since I’ve made one of these posts and thankfully my old tutorial is still fairly relevant to today’s Rojo setup but I think I missed out a few things in my tutorial that I could’ve stepped out better, which is the purpose of me making this one.

Introduction

So what is Rojo?

Ripped straight from Rojo’s repository:

“Rojo enables Roblox developers to use professional-grade software engineering tools”

Which in layman’s terms basically means that you can edit/store your code in an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) like Visual Studio Code (VSC) and sync it over to Roblox studio.

So why is Rojo good?

A lot of reasons! For one you can use a bunch of the awesome stuff that the OSS community has made like Rokit, React lua, and Luau LSP super easily! It also allows you to use source control tools like Git and GitHub which make working in a large team really easy.

Do I have to use Rojo?

Nope! While I find it’s easier to use it when working in a large team, it’s totally up to you and whatever you feel comfortable with.

Preparation

For this tutorial, we’ll be using Visual Studio Code as I find it’s the easiest IDE to work with. So you’ll need the following for this tutorial:

We’ll also get to using tools like Git later on but for now we’ll just focus on getting the basics covered.

Actually Installing Rojo

There’s a good guide on Rojo’s official website on how to install Rojo so here I’ll just be attempting to make it a bit clearer and to address any possibly misunderstandings.

Installing Rojo Itself

With the VSC Extension

VSC Extension download link: Rojo - Roblox Studio Sync - Visual Studio Marketplace

Not too much else to add here, there’s a guide on the download page above that should clear everything up.

With the CLI

Using Aftman/Rokit

On the page, Rojo recommends that you use Aftman to install it but Aftman has now been superseded by Rokit, you can find out how to install Rokit here.

After that, just run rokit add rojo-rbx/rojo in your terminal and rokit install after that.

From GitHub

Installing the binaries from GitHub is fairly simple but adding Rojo to your path can be a bit confusing. Here’s how you can do it on Windows and Mac (because if you use Linux then you already know what you’re doing):

If you’re using crates then you probably know what you’re doing so we’ll leave that one out.

Installing the Rojo Plugin

If you downloaded the VSC extension earlier then you can skip this bit.

Installing the plugin is fairly trivial and you can find the appropriate instructions on this page (scroll down). Personally I find the installation from Roblox is the best.

Congrats, we’re now setup and ready to go!

Setting up a Project

If you’ve already got a project on GitHub

If you’ve got a project already on GitHub that you want to download then you can clone the repository. There are two easy ways to do this, using the CLI or using the VSC command palette.

Note: Before starting this section, you should install Git.

Using the CLI method

There’s a nice article by GitHub that explains this really nicely: Cloning a repository - GitHub Docs

Using the VSC command palette

You can find how to clone a repository using the command palette here. The article also goes over a bunch of helpful stuff with regards to using Git/GitHub with VSC. We’ll be revisiting this article later on in this tutorial.

Making a new project

To make a new folder for VSC, you can make a folder yourself, get VSC to do it for you or get Rojo to do it for you.

Making the folder yourself

This is the way I make folders and I find it the easiest. To start, go into your Desktop folder and make a new folder called “dev” or anything else that makes sense for holding all your coding projects. After you’ve done that, make a folder inside “dev” and call it the name of your project.

Now there are two different ways to go for windows and mac. I’ll explain them both.

Windows

Once that’s done, go into the path bar and double click on it:

Then delete all the text in the bar:

Then write cmd in place of that text, so it should look like:

This will open your terminal which you then run code . in and voila your folder will open in VSC, congrats!

Mac

Open your terminal and cd into your folder, if you’re unsure how to do this just look up a tutorial (I couldn’t find a concise one that I liked but there are a bunch of good tutorials out there on youtube and other platforms).

After that just run code .

Now we’re ready to move on!

Getting VSC to do it for you

Open a new, blank window in VSC by doing Ctrl + Shift + N for windows and Cmd + Shift + N for mac.

Then click on your explorer (the two files-looking icon at the top of your sidebar), and you should get this menu:

Then just click “Open Folder”, make a new folder and select that, I like to put this folder under a “dev” folder which is usually under Desktop.

Done!

Using Rojo

Ensure that you’re in the directory that you want to make your game in, for me I have a folder called “dev” which I store all my coding projects in which is under the “Desktop” folder.

Then open that directory in your terminal (find out how to do that here (windows) and this is for mac) and run rojo init my-new-game. (replace my-new-game with whatever you want your project to be called)

Rojo will now create a new folder called “my-new-game” in the directory you ran the command in and install itself into the project. To open this folder in VSC, run cd my-new-game (replace my-new-game with the name of your project) and then run code .

Done, nice work!

Setting up Rojo in your project

You can skip this section if you did the rojo init my-new-game method in the last section.

I’ll be basing this part of the tutorial off this article.

Using VSC

I feel like the tutorial on the article linked above is sufficient for this but you can also take a look at my old tutorial if you want (linked at the start of this tutorial).

Using CLI

Just run rojo init in your terminal.

Make sure you’re in the folder you made earlier when you run this command.

Just in regards to the above, if you ran rojo init my-new-game then rojo will create a new folder called “my-new-game” in the folder that you made, which we don’t want!

Syncing into Roblox Studio

¡Vamos! We’re almost done, for this section, this article explains everything that you need to know for syncing to studio. But you can also check out my old tutorial if you want some more pictures.

Congrats, you’re now syncing and our work is done!

Using Git and GitHub

I recommend reading through these three articles for this:

There’s also an FAQ there which should hopefully answer any of your other questions in regards to this topic!

Questions?

Let me know! You can get in touch with me with the following methods:

Here on the DevForum via leaving a comment or sending me a PM
Discord: @midnightific
OSS Server: Roblox OSS Community (I’d recommend joining this even if you don’t have questions as it’s a great resource for learning more about Rojo and other popular Roblox tools and libraries)

Bye!

Thanks for reading and happy developing!