Ethereum is an open source crypto project written in the Go language (among others: Py & C++). This is the official Go implementation and home of geth, and the Ethereum toolset.
Ethereum's publicly available network can be accessed by anyone at any time, freely without any cost. It can serve as a backbone for any open or closed sourced project that requires (but not necessarily) the rebustnes of free public peer to peer networks with a consesus backing layer.
Ethereum may also (freely) be run in a private (corporate) environment without any cost, all core source is licensed under the LGPL and all frontend code is licensed under GPL.
For more information about the Ethereum protocol refer to the official Ethereum website.
Getting started
Getting started with ethereum is simple, the only thing you require is the geth binary. Please refer to the developer documentation for a beginner tutorial on how to get started with the Go Ethereum API.Development builds
The following builds are build automatically by our build servers after each push to the develop branch.
Building the source
For prerequisites and detailed build instructions please read the Installation Instructions on the wiki.
Building geth requires two external dependencies, Go and GMP. You can install them using your favourite package manager. Once the dependencies are installed, run
make geth
Executables
Go Ethereum comes with several wrappers/executables found in
the cmd directory:
| Command | |
|---|---|
geth |
Ethereum CLI (ethereum command line interface client) |
bootnode |
runs a bootstrap node for the Discovery Protocol |
ethtest |
test tool which runs with the tests suite: /path/to/test.json > ethtest --test BlockTests --stdin. |
evm |
is a generic Ethereum Virtual Machine: evm -code 60ff60ff -gas 10000 -price 0 -dump. See -h for a detailed description. |
disasm |
disassembles EVM code: echo "6001" | disasm
|
rlpdump |
prints RLP structures |
Command line options
geth can be configured via command line options, environment variables and config files.
Geth comes with extensive build in help. To get the available options:
geth help
For further details on options, see the wiki
Contribution
If you'd like to contribute to go-ethereum please fork, fix, commit and
send a pull request. Commits who do not comply with the coding standards
are ignored (use gofmt!). If you send pull requests make absolute sure that you
commit on the develop branch and that you do not merge to master.
Commits that are directly based on master are simply ignored.
See Developers' Guide for more details on configuring your environment, testing, and dependency management.