You can install the Go implementation of Ethereum using a variety of ways. These include installing it via your favorite package manager; downloading a standalone pre-built bundle; running as a docker container; or building it yourself. This document details all of the possibilities to get you joining the Ethereum network using whatever means you prefer.
The easiest way to install go-ethereum on Ubuntu-based distributions is with the built in launchpad PPAs (Personal Package Archives). We provide a single PPA repository that contains both our stable and develop releases for Ubuntu versions `trusty`, `xenial`, `zesty` and `artful`.
We distribute our stable releases and develop builds as standalone bundles. These are useful when 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.
For all archives we provide separate ones containing only Geth, and separate ones containing Geth along with all the developer tools from our repository (`abigen`, `bootnode`, `disasm`, `evm`, `rlpdump`). Read our [`README`](https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum#executables) for more information about these executables.
If you prefer containerized processes, you can run go-ethereum as a Docker container. We maintain four different Docker images for running the latest stable or develop versions of Geth.
_Note, if you are running an Ethereum client inside a Docker container, you should mount a data volume as the client's data directory (located at `/root/.ethereum` inside the container) to ensure that downloaded data is preserved between restarts and/or container life-cycles._
Go Ethereum is written in [Go](https://golang.org), so to build from source code you need the most recent version of Go. This guide doesn't cover how to install Go itself, for details read the [Go installation instructions](https://golang.org/doc/install) and grab any needed bundles from the [Go download page](https://golang.org/dl/).
The above command checks out the default version of Go Ethereum into your local `GOPATH` work space, but does not build any executables. To do that you can either build one specifically:
Or you can build the entire project and install `geth` along with all developer tools by running `go install ./...` in the repository root inside your `GOPATH` work space.
If you do not want to set up Go workspaces on your machine, only build `geth` and forget about the build process, you can clone our repository directly into a folder of your choosing and invoke `make`, which configures everything for a temporary build and cleans up afterwards. Note that this method of building only works on UNIX-like operating systems.
This creates a `geth` executable file in the `go-ethereum/build/bin` folder that you can move wherever you want to run from. The binary is standalone and doesn't require any additional files.
