Installation Instructions for Mac

Installing with Homebrew

By far the easiest way to install go-ethereum is to use our Homebrew tap. If you don't have Homebrew, install it first.

Then run the following commands to add the tap and install geth:

brew tap ethereum/ethereum
brew install ethereum

You can install the develop branch by running --devel:

brew install ethereum --devel

For installing mist, add --with-gui.

After installing, run geth to start your node.

For options and patches, see: https://github.com/ethereum/homebrew-ethereum

Building from source

Building Geth (command line client)

Clone the repository to a directory of your choosing:

git clone https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum

Building geth requires some external libraries to be installed:

• GMP
• Go

brew install gmp go

Finally, build the geth program using the following command.

cd go-ethereum
make geth

You can now run build/bin/geth to start your node.

Building Mist (GUI)

Note: Mist is currently a work in progress and might not always work.

Clone the repository to a directory of your choosing:

git clone https://github.com/ethereum/go-ethereum

Building mist requires some external libraries to be installed:

• GMP
• Qt 5
• Qt 5 WebEngine
• Go

Install these first:

brew install gmp go qt5
brew link -f qt5 # This is required, sorry.

Finally, build the mist program using the following commands:

cd go-ethereum
make mist

Mist does not automatically look in the right location for its GUI assets. You can set the asset path on the command line.

build/bin/mist --asset_path cmd/mist/assets

Or launch it from its source directory instead:

cd cmd/mist
../../build/bin/mist