Official golang implementation of the Ethereum protocol.
Automated builds are available for stable releases and the unstable master branch. Binary archives are published at https://geth.ethereum.org/downloads/.
For prerequisites and detailed build instructions please read the Installation Instructions on the wiki.
Building geth requires both a Go (version 1.7 or later) and a C compiler. You can install them using your favourite package manager. Once the dependencies are installed, run
make geth
or, to build the full suite of utilities:
make all
Going through all the possible command line flags is out of scope here (please consult our CLI Wiki page), but we've enumerated a few common parameter combos to get you up to speed quickly on how you can run your own Geth instance.
By far the most common scenario is people wanting to simply interact with the Ethereum network: create accounts; transfer funds; deploy and interact with contracts. For this particular use-case the user doesn't care about years-old historical data, so we can fast-sync quickly to the current state of the network. To do so:
$ geth --fast --cache=512 console
This command will:
- Start geth in fast sync mode (
--fast
), causing it to download more data in exchange for avoiding processing the entire history of the Ethereum network, which is very CPU intensive. - Bump the memory allowance of the database to 512MB (
--cache=512
), which can help significantly in sync times especially for HDD users. This flag is optional and you can set it as high or as low as you'd like, though we'd recommend the 512MB - 2GB range. - Start up Geth's built-in interactive JavaScript console,
(via the trailing
console
subcommand) through which you can invoke all officialweb3
methods as well as Geth's own management APIs. This too is optional and if you leave it out you can always attach to an already running Geth instance withgeth attach
.
Transitioning towards developers, if you'd like to play around with creating Ethereum contracts, you almost certainly would like to do that without any real money involved until you get the hang of the entire system. In other words, instead of attaching to the main network, you want to join the test network with your node, which is fully equivalent to the main network, but with play-Ether only.
$ geth --testnet --fast --cache=512 console
The --fast
, --cache
flags and console
subcommand have the exact same meaning as above and they
are equally useful on the testnet too. Please see above for their explanations if you've skipped to
here.
Specifying the --testnet
flag however will reconfigure your Geth instance a bit:
- Instead of using the default data directory (
~/.ethereum
on Linux for example), Geth will nest itself one level deeper into atestnet
subfolder (~/.ethereum/testnet
on Linux). Note, on OSX and Linux this also means that attaching to a running testnet node requires the use of a custom endpoint sincegeth attach
will try to attach to a production node endpoint by default. E.g.geth attach <datadir>/testnet/geth.ipc
. Windows users are not affected by this. - Instead of connecting the main Ethereum network, the client will connect to the test network, which uses different P2P bootnodes, different network IDs and genesis states.
Note: Although there are some internal protective measures to prevent transactions from crossing over between the main network and test network, you should make sure to always use separate accounts for play-money and real-money. Unless you manually move accounts, Geth will by default correctly separate the two networks and will not make any accounts available between them.
The go-ethereum library (i.e. all code outside of the cmd
directory) is licensed under the
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0, also
included in our repository in the COPYING.LESSER
file.
The go-ethereum binaries (i.e. all code inside of the cmd
directory) is licensed under the
GNU General Public License v3.0, also included
in our repository in the COPYING
file.