Compiling and Installing Ethereum (Geth) on Ubuntu or Debian

In our last post, we wrote a tutorial on how to install Bitcoin Core on your system. In this post, we’re going to write the instructions to install Ethereum at your server.

While, installing Geth is certainly not a PITA, but maintaining it is surely a daunting task, but worth it if you’re looking for the safety and ownership of the funds.

Before we start, it’s very noteworthy to mention that Geth doesn’t run well on HDD. It’s advised that you use a SSD drive with a storage space of 256 GB at minimum to be covered for some time. Our experience with Geth installation on HDD was horrific as it would rarely get in sync with the latest block, many times stop syncing itself and other times crash.

Installing Dependencies

To begin with the installation, we’ll be required to install build-essential andĀ golangĀ at our server.

apt-get update;
apt-get install git build-essential -y;
wget https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.9.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz;
tar -xvf go1.9.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz;
mv go /usr/local;
export GOROOT=/usr/local/go;
export GOPATH=$HOME/Projects/Proj1;
export PATH=$GOPATH/bin:$GOROOT/bin:$PATH;

Compiling and Installing Geth

You can now execute the following commands at your server to download the source files and compile them. Once the process is done, the generated executable file is automatically moved to the root folder.

git clone https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum.git;
cd go-ethereum;
make geth;
mv /root/go-ethereum/build/bin/geth /root/;
rm -rf /root/go-ethereum;
rm -rf /root/go1.9.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz;
cd /root;

Example Commands (Bonus!)

Here are few example commands to get Get running at your server.

./geth --rpc
./geth -attach

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