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| title | permalink |
|---|---|
| Getting Started with Geth | getting-started |
Installing
You can install the Go implementation of Ethereum in a variety of ways. These include installing it via your favorite package manager; downloading a standalone pre-built binary; running as a docker container; or building it yourself. This section highlights the common options, but you can find others in the left hand menu, or in the install and build section.
Install on macOS via Homebrew
You can install go-ethereum on macOS using our Homebrew tap. If you don't have Homebrew, install it first.
Then run the following commands to add the tap and install geth:
brew tap ethereum/ethereum
brew install ethereum
Read this guide further Homebrew options.
Install on Ubuntu via PPAs
You can install go-ethereum on Ubuntu-based distributions using the built-in launchpad PPAs (Personal Package Archives). We provide a single PPA repository with both our stable and our development releases for Ubuntu versions trusty, xenial, zesty and artful.
Install dependencies first:
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
To enable our launchpad repository run:
sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ethereum/ethereum
After that you can install the stable version of go-ethereum:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ethereum
Read this guide for further Ubuntu options.
Install on Windows
Although we were shipping Chocolatey packages for a time after the Frontier release, the constant manual approval process led to us stopping distribution. We will try to negotiate trusted package status for go-ethereum so the Chocolatey option is available again.
Until then grab a Windows installer from our downloads page.
Download standalone binary
We distribute all our stable releases and development builds as standalone binaries. These are useful for scenarios where you'd like to: a) install a specific version of our code (e.g., for reproducible environments); b) install on machines without internet access (e.g., air gapped computers); or c) do not like automatic updates and would rather manually install software.
We create the following standalone binaries:
- 32bit, 64bit, ARMv5, ARMv6, ARMv7 and ARM64 archives (
.tar.gz) on Linux - 64bit archives (
.tar.gz) on macOS - 32bit and 64bit archives (
.zip) and installers (.exe) on Windows
For all binaries we provide two options, one containing only Geth, and another containing Geth along with all the developer tools from our repository (abigen, bootnode, disasm, evm, rlpdump). Read our README for more information about these executables.
To download these binaries, head to the Go Ethereum Downloads page.
Run inside docker container
We maintain a Docker image with recent snapshot builds from our develop branch on DockerHub. In addition to the container based on Ubuntu (158 MB), there is a smaller image using Alpine Linux (35 MB). To use the alpine tag, replace ethereum/client-go with ethereum/client-go:alpine in the examples below.
To pull the image and start a node, run these commands:
docker pull ethereum/client-go
docker run -it -p 30303:30303 ethereum/client-go
Read this guide for further Docker options.
Starting a node
Create an account
Before starting Geth you first need to create an account that represents a key pair. Use the following command to create a new account and set a password for that account:
geth account new
Read this guide for more details on importing existing Ethereum accounts and other uses of the account command.
Sync modes
Running Geth starts an Ethereum node that can join any existing network, or create a new one. You can start Geth in one of three different sync modes using the --syncmode "{mode}" argument that determines what sort of node it is in the network.
These are:
- Full: Downloads all blocks (including headers, transactions and receipts) and generates the state of the blockchain incrementally by executing every block.
- Fast (Default): Downloads all blocks (including headers, transactions and receipts), verifies all headers, and downloads the state and verifies it against the headers.
- Light: Downloads all block headers, block data, and verifies some randomly.
For example:
geth --syncmode "light"
Connect to node
Once you have an account and Geth is running, you can interact with it by opening another terminal and using the following command to open a JavaScript console:
geth attach
In the console you can issue any of the Geth commands, for example, to list all the accounts on the node, use:
eth.accounts
You can also enter the console directly when you start the node with the console command:
geth --syncmode "light" console