Lesson: Download and Install IPFS

Goals

After doing this Lesson you will be able to

• Download IPFS and install it on your operating system

• Display which version of IPFS you're using

• Get a list of commands the ipfs binary supports

Steps

Step 1: Download the Prebuilt IPFS Package

Visit the IPFS installation page at https://docs.ipfs.io/guides/guides/install/ and download the prebuilt ipfs binaries for your operating system.

Why does the installation page talk about "Go IPFS"? There are multiple implementations of the IPFS protocol. The core IPFS team maintain implementations in Golang and Javascript. Those are commonly referred to as go-ipfs and js-ipfs. The official binaries are built from the Go implementation.

Step 2: Unzip the Prebuilt Package

The binaries for Mac OSX and Linux are in a gzipped tar format (.tar.gz). The binaries for Windows are in a zip file. Use the appropriate tool to unzip the file. There are some hints on https://docs.ipfs.io/guides/guides/install/ under the heading Installing from a Prebuilt Package

This will create a directory called go-ipfs.

LICENSE        README.md    build-log    install.sh ipfs

The file named ipfs is your executable ipfs binary.

Step 3: Install the IPFS Binary on your executable path

To install the binary, all you need to do is put the ipfs binary file somewhere on your executable PATH.

Note about permissions: Whichever approach you use to install the binary, make sure you have the necessary permissions. On Mac OSX or Linux, you probably want to use sudo, which is already installed on most systems.

If you're on Mac OSX or Linux, you can use the provided install script by running

cd go-ipfs
sudo ./install.sh

Read the output from running this. If it complains about being unable to write the file, you need to deal with permissions (see the note above about permissions)

Step 4: Display the IPFS version

When you're troubleshooting, it's important to know which version of ipfs you're using. To find out the current version, run

$ ipfs version

Step 5: Display the IPFS help page and list of commands

If you need help remembering how to use any ipfs commands, run

$ ipfs help

This should display information beginning with

USAGE:

    ipfs - Global p2p merkle-dag filesystem.
...

For a complete list of commands that the ipfs executable supports, run

$ ipfs commands

Next Steps

Next, Initialize your IPFS Repository