73 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
73 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Go API
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---
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The Ethereum blockchain along with its two extension protocols Whisper and Swarm was
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originally conceptualized to become the supporting pillar of web3, providing the
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consensus, messaging and storage backbone for a new generation of distributed (actually,
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decentralized) applications called DApps.
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The first incarnation towards this dream of web3 was a command line client providing an
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RPC interface into the peer-to-peer protocols. The client was soon enough extended with a
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web-browser-like graphical user interface, permitting developers to write DApps based on
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the tried and proven HTML/CSS/JS technologies.
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As many DApps have more complex requirements than what a browser environment can handle,
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it became apparent that providing programmatic access to the web3 pillars would open the
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door towards a new class of applications. As such, the second incarnation of the web3
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dream is to open up all our technologies for other projects as reusable components.
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Starting with the 1.5 release family of `go-ethereum`, we transitioned away from providing
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only a full blown Ethereum client and started shipping official Go packages that could be
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embedded into third party desktop and server applications.
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*Note, this guide will assume you are familiar with Go development. It will make no
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attempts to cover general topics about Go project layouts, import paths or any other
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standard methodologies. If you are new to Go, consider reading its [getting started
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guides](https://github.com/golang/go/wiki#getting-started-with-go) first.*
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## Quick overview
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Our reusable Go libraries focus on four main usage areas:
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- Simplified client side account management
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- Remote node interfacing via different transports
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- Contract interactions through auto-generated bindings
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- In-process Ethereum, Whisper and Swarm peer-to-peer node
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You can watch a quick overview about these in Peter's (@karalabe) talk titled "Import
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Geth: Ethereum from Go and beyond", presented at the Ethereum Devcon2 developer conference
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in September, 2016 (Shanghai). Slides are [available
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here](https://ethereum.karalabe.com/talks/2016-devcon.html).
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[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0Ia1U9Gxjg)
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## Go packages
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The `go-ethereum` library is distributed as a collection of standard Go packages straight
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from our GitHub repository. The packages can be used directly via the official Go toolkit,
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without needing any third party tools. External dependencies are vendored locally into
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`vendor`, ensuring both self-containment as well as code stability. If you reuse
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`go-ethereum` in your own project, please follow these best practices and vendor it
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yourself too to avoid any accidental API breakages!
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The canonical import path for `go-ethereum` is `github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum`, with all
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packages residing underneath. Although there are [quite a
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number](https://godoc.org/github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum#pkg-subdirectories) of them,
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you'll only need to care about a limited subset, each of which will be properly introduced
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in their relevant section.
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You can download all our packages via:
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```
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$ go get -d github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/...
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```
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You may also need Go's original context package. Although this was moved into the official
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Go SDK in Go 1.7, `go-ethereum` will depend on the original `golang.org/x/net/context`
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package until we officially drop support for Go 1.5 and Go 1.6.
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```
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$ go get -u golang.org/x/net/context
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```
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