---
title: Build from source
---
<!-- TODO: Maybe move? -->

Go Ethereum (as its name implies) is written in [Go](https://golang.org), and as such to build from source code you need to have at least Go 1.7 installed (preferably the latest version, currently at 1.9.2). This guide does not go into details on how to install Go itself, for that please read the [Go installation instructions](https://golang.org/doc/install).

Assuming you have Go installed, you can download our project via:

```shell
go get -d github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum
```

The above command will checkout the default version of Go Ethereum into your local `GOPATH` work space, but it will not build any executables for you. To do that you can either build one specifically:

    go install github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum/cmd/geth

Or you can also 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.

### Building without a Go workflow

If you do not want to set up Go work spaces 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 will configure everything for a temporary build and clean up after itself:

    git clone https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum.git
    cd go-ethereum
    make geth

This will create a `geth` (or `geth.exe` on Windows) 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.