Lesson: Download and Install IPFS
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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
Visit the IPFS installation page at 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 and . The official binaries are built from the Go implementation.
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 under the heading Installing from a Prebuilt Package
This will create a directory called go-ipfs.
The file named ipfs is your executable ipfs binary.
To install the binary, all you need to do is put the ipfs binary file somewhere on your executable PATH.
If you're on Mac OSX or Linux, you can use the provided install script by running
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)
When you're troubleshooting, it's important to know which version of ipfs you're using. To find out the current version, run
If you need help remembering how to use any ipfs commands, run
This should display information beginning with
For a complete list of commands that the ipfs executable supports, run
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 , which is already installed on most systems.
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