README.md

Go Ethereum

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/.

Building the source

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

Executables

The go-ethereum project comes with several wrappers/executables found in the cmd directory.

Command	Description
geth	Our main Ethereum CLI client. It is the entry point into the Ethereum network (main-, test- or private net), capable of running as a full node (default) archive node (retaining all historical state) or a light node (retrieving data live). It can be used by other processes as a gateway into the Ethereum network via JSON RPC endpoints exposed on top of HTTP, WebSocket and/or IPC transports. geth --help and the CLI Wiki page for command line options.
abigen	Source code generator to convert Ethereum contract definitions into easy to use, compile-time type-safe Go packages. It operates on plain Ethereum contract ABIs with expanded functionality if the contract bytecode is also available. However it also accepts Solidity source files, making development much more streamlined. Please see our Native DApps wiki page for details.
bootnode	Stripped down version of our Ethereum client implementation that only takes part in the network node discovery protocol, but does not run any of the higher level application protocols. It can be used as a lightweight bootstrap node to aid in finding peers in private networks.
evm	Developer utility version of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that is capable of running bytecode snippets within a configurable environment and execution mode. Its purpose is to allow isolated, fine-grained debugging of EVM opcodes (e.g. evm --code 60ff60ff --debug).
gethrpctest	Developer utility tool to support our ethereum/rpc-test test suite which validates baseline conformity to the Ethereum JSON RPC specs. Please see the test suite's readme for details.
rlpdump	Developer utility tool to convert binary RLP (Recursive Length Prefix) dumps (data encoding used by the Ethereum protocol both network as well as consensus wise) to user friendlier hierarchical representation (e.g. rlpdump --hex CE0183FFFFFFC4C304050583616263).
swarm	swarm daemon and tools. This is the entrypoint for the swarm network. swarm --help for command line options and subcommands. See https://swarm-guide.readthedocs.io for swarm documentation.
puppeth	a CLI wizard that aids in creating a new Ethereum network.

Running geth

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.

Full node on the main Ethereum network

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 console

This command will:

• Start geth in fast sync mode (default, can be changed with the --syncmode flag), causing it to download more data in exchange for avoiding processing the entire history of the Ethereum network, which is very CPU intensive.
• Start up Geth's built-in interactive JavaScript console, (via the trailing console subcommand) through which you can invoke all official web3 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 with geth attach.