Installation

At the time of writing, there are no pre-compiled binaries. So you gonna have to compile brig yourself - but don’t worry that is 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 (>= 1.9). The version in your package manager might be too outdated, if you’re on e.g. Debian.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 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.
$ make                                   # Build the software.
$ sudo make install                      # Install it system-wide (optional)

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 make 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

$ brig help

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


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