Installation and Updates

Swarm is part of the Ethereum stack, the reference implementation is currently at POC3 (proof of concept 3), or version 0.3.

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

Note

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

Installing Swarm binaries

THIS SECTION IS MISSING

Installing Swarm from source

The source code is found on github: https://github.com/ethersphere/go-ethereum/tree/swarm-network-rewrite/

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 git

sudo apt install git

and install go with

sudo apt install golang

However, at the time of writing the version of golang that is in the repositories for Ubuntu and Debian is too old. (See below. for instructions on how to get the newer version)

while on Mac OSX you’d use brew

brew install go git

Then you must prepare your go environment as follows

mkdir $HOME/go
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
echo 'export GOPATH=$HOME/go' >> ~/.bashrc
export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin' >> ~/.bashrc

Ubuntu

At the time of writing, the Ubuntu repositories carry an older version of Go. Up to date instruction on how to install the newest version of Go in Ubuntu can always be found here.

Ubuntu users can use the ‘gophers’ PPA to install an up to date version of Go. 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. Thus you would install golang 1.10 with

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gophers/archive
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install golang-1.10-go

and then add /usr/lib/go-1.10/bin to your PATH environment variable.

export PATH="$PATH:/usr/lib/go-1.10/bin"
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/go-1.10/bin' >> ~/.bashrc

You must also set up a go folder and GOPATH.

mkdir $HOME/go
export GOPATH=$HOME/go
echo 'export GOPATH=$HOME/go' >> ~/.bashrc
export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin' >> ~/.bashrc

Generic linux

The latest version of golang can be found at https://golang.org/dl/

To install it, download the tar.gz file

curl -O https://dl.google.com/go/go1.10.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Unpack it to the /usr/local

sudo tar -C /usr/local -xzf go1.10.1.linux-amd64.tar.gz

Set GOPATH and PATH:

Setup a go folder and declare it as the GOPATH

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

Update your PATH variable to include binaries installed with go

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

Read the environment variables into current session:

source ~/.bashrc

Compiling and installing

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/ethersphere/go-ethereum
cd go-ethereum
git checkout swarm-network-rewrite
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 if the installation of swarm was successful:

swarm version

or, if your PATH is not set and the swarm command can not be found, try:

$GOPATH/bin/swarm version

This should return some relevant information. For example:

Swarm
Version: 0.3
Network Id: 0
Go Version: go1.10.1
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