Installation and Updates

Installation

Swarm is part of the Ethereum stack, the reference implementation is currently at POC (proof of concept) version 0.2.

The source code is found on github: https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/tree/master/

Supported Platforms

Geth runs on all major platforms (linux, MacOSX, Windows, also raspberry pi, android OS, iOS).

Note

This package has not been tested on platforms other than linux and OSX.

Prerequisites

building the swarm daemon swarm requires the following packages:

Grab the relevant prerequisites and build from source.

On linux (ubuntu/debian variants) use apt to install go and git

sudo apt install golang git

while on Mac OSX you’d use brew

brew install go git

Then you must prepare your go environment as follows

mkdir ~/go
export GOPATH="$HOME/go"
echo 'export GOPATH="$HOME/go"' >> ~/.profile

Ubuntu

The Ubuntu repositories carry an old version of Go.

Ubuntu users can use the ‘gophers’ PPA to install an up to date version of Go (version 1.7 or later is preferred). See https://launchpad.net/~gophers/+archive/ubuntu/archive for more information. Note that this PPA requires adding /usr/lib/go-1.X/bin to the executable PATH.

Other distros

Download the latest distribution

curl -O https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.9.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Unpack it to the /usr/local (might require sudo)

tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.9.2.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Set GOPATH and PATH

For Go to work properly, you need to set the following two environment variables:

Setup a go folder

mkdir -p ~/go; echo "export GOPATH=$HOME/go" >> ~/.bashrc

Update your path

echo "export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/go/bin:/usr/local/go/bin" >> ~/.bashrc

Read the environment variables into current session:

source ~/.bashrc

Installing from source

Once all prerequisites are met, download the go-ethereum source code

mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/ethereum
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/ethereum
git clone https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum
cd go-ethereum
git checkout master
go get github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum

and finally compile the swarm daemon swarm and the main go-ethereum client geth.

go install -v ./cmd/geth
go install -v ./cmd/swarm

You can now run swarm to start your swarm node. Let’s check swarm’s installation

$GOPATH/bin/swarm version

Should give you some relevant information back

Swarm
Version: 0.2
Network Id: 0
Go Version: go1.9.2
OS: linux
GOPATH=/home/user/go
GOROOT=/usr/local/go

Updating your client

To update your client simply download the newest source code and recompile.

cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum
git checkout master
git pull
go install -v ./cmd/geth
go install -v ./cmd/swarm