Installation

We provide pre-compiled binaries on every release. brig comes to your computer as a single binary that includes everything you need. See here for the release list:

Just download the binary for you platform, unpack it and put in somewhere in your $PATH (for example /usr/local/bin).

If you trust us well enough, you can also use this online installer to download the latest stable brig binary to your current working directory:

$ bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sahib/brig/master/scripts/install.sh)

Specific distributions

Some distributions can install brig directly via their package manager. Those are currently:

  • Arch Linux (PKGBUILD; builds develop branch)

Compiling yourself

If you use a platform we don’t provide binaries for or if you want to use a development version, you’re going have to compile brig yourself. But don’t worry that’s quite easy. We do not have many dependencies. You only need two things: The programming language Go and the version control system git.

Step 0: Installing Go

This is only required if you don’t already have Go installed. Please consult your package manager for that.

Warning

brig only works with a newer version of Go (>= 1.10). The version in your package manager might be too outdated, if you’re on e.g. Debian. Make sure it’s rather up to date! If it’s too old you can always use tools like gvm to get a more recent version.

If you did not do that, you gonna need to install Go. Refere here for possible ways of doing so. Remember to set the GOPATH environment variable to a place where you’d like to have your .go sources being placed. For example you can put this in your .bashrc:

# Place the go sources in a "go" directory inside your home directory:
export GOPATH=~/go
# This is needed for the go toolchain:
export GOBIN="$GOPATH/bin"
# Make sure that our shell finds the go binaries:
export PATH="$GOPATH/bin:$PATH"

By choosing to have the GOPATH in your home directory you’re not required to have sudo permissions later on. You also need to have git installed for the next step.

Step 1: Compile & Install brig

This step requires setting GOPATH, as discussed in the previous section.

$ go get -d -v -u github.com/sahib/brig  # Download the sources.
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/sahib/brig   # Go to the source directory.
$ go run mage.go                         # Build the software.

All dependencies of brig are downloaded for you during the first step. Execution might take a few minutes though because all of brig is being compiled during the go run mage.go step.

If you cannot or want to install git for some reason, you can manually download a zip from GitHub and place its contents into $GOPATH/src/github.com/sahib/brig. In this case, you can skip the go get step.

Step 2: Test if the installation is working

If everything worked, there will be a brig binary in $GOBIN.

$ brig help

If above command prints out documentation on how to use the program’s commandline switches then the installation worked. Happy file shipping!

Setting up IPFS

brig requires a running IPFS daemon. While brig has ways to do install a IPFS daemon for you, it is preferable to install it via your package manager or via the official way:

Continue with Getting started or directly go to Quickstart if you just need a refresh on the details.