Go Ethereum
Golang execution layer implementation of the Ethereum protocol.
Automated builds are available for stable releases and the unstable master branch. Binary
archives are published at https://geth.ethereum.org/downloads/.
Building the source
For prerequisites and detailed build instructions please read the Installation Instructions.
Building geth requires both a Go (version 1.23 or later) and a C compiler. You can install
them using your favourite package manager. Once the dependencies are installed, run
make geth
or, to build the full suite of utilities:
make all
Executables
The go-ethereum project comes with several wrappers/executables found in the cmd
directory.
| Command |
Description |
geth |
Our main Ethereum CLI client. It is the entry point into the Ethereum network (main-, test- or private net), capable of running as a full node (default) or archive node (retaining all historical state). It can be used by other processes as a gateway into the Ethereum network via JSON RPC endpoints exposed on top of HTTP, WebSocket and/or IPC transports. geth --help and the CLI page for command line options. |
devp2p |
Utilities to interact with nodes on the networking layer, without running a full blockchain. |
abigen |
Source code generator to convert Ethereum contract definitions into easy-to-use, compile-time type-safe Go packages. It operates on plain Ethereum contract ABIs with expanded functionality if the contract bytecode is also available. However, it also accepts Solidity source files, making development much more streamlined. Please see our Native DApps page for details. |
evm |
Developer utility version of the EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) that is capable of running bytecode snippets within a configurable environment and execution mode. Its purpose is to allow isolated, fine-grained debugging of EVM opcodes (e.g. evm --code 60ff60ff --debug run). |
rlpdump |
Developer utility tool to convert binary RLP (Recursive Length Prefix) dumps (data encoding used by the Ethereum protocol both network as well as consensus wise) to user-friendlier hierarchical representation (e.g. rlpdump --hex CE0183FFFFFFC4C304050583616263). |
Running geth
Going through all the possible command line flags is out of scope here (please consult our
CLI Wiki page),
but we've enumerated a few common parameter combos to get you up to speed quickly
on how you can run your own geth instance.
Hardware Requirements
Minimum:
- CPU with 4+ cores
- 8GB RAM
- High-performance SSD with at least 2TB of free space
- 8 MBit/sec download Internet service
Recommended:
- Fast CPU with 8+ cores
- 16GB+ RAM
- High-performance NVMe SSD with 2TB-4TB of space for long term growth and maintenance headroom
- 25+ MBit/sec download Internet service
Full node on the main Ethereum network
By far the most common scenario is people wanting to simply interact with the Ethereum
network: create accounts; transfer funds; deploy and interact with contracts. For this
particular use case, the user doesn't care about years-old historical data, so we can
sync quickly to the current state of the network. To do so:
$ geth console
This command will:
- Start
geth in snap sync mode (default, can be changed with the --syncmode flag),
causing it to download more data in exchange for avoiding processing the entire history
of the Ethereum network, which is very CPU intensive.
- Start the built-in interactive JavaScript console,
(via the trailing
console subcommand) through which you can interact using web3 methods
(note: the web3 version bundled within geth is very old, and not up to date with official docs),
as well as geth's own management APIs.
This tool is optional and if you leave it out you can always attach it to an already running
geth instance with geth attach.
A Full node on the Sepolia test network
Transitioning towards developers, if you'd like to play around with creating Ethereum
contracts, you almost certainly would like to do that without any real money involved until
you get the hang of the entire system. In other words, instead of attaching to the main
network, you want to join the test network with your node, which is fully equivalent to
the main network, but with play-Ether only.
$ geth --sepolia console
The console subcommand has the same meaning as above and is equally
useful on the testnet too.
Specifying the --sepolia flag, however, will reconfigure your geth instance a bit:
- Instead of connecting to the main Ethereum network, the client will connect to the Sepolia
test network, which uses different P2P bootnodes, different network IDs and genesis
states.
- Instead of using the default data directory (
~/.ethereum on Linux for example), geth
will nest itself one level deeper into a sepolia subfolder (~/.ethereum/sepolia on
Linux). Note, on OSX and Linux this also means that attaching to a running testnet node
requires the use of a custom endpoint since geth attach will try to attach to a
production node endpoint by default, e.g.,
geth attach <datadir>/sepolia/geth.ipc. Windows users are not affected by
this.
Note: Although some internal protective measures prevent transactions from
crossing over between the main network and test network, you should always
use separate accounts for play and real money. Unless you manually move
accounts, geth will by default correctly separate the two networks and will not make any
accounts available between them.
Configuration
As an alternative to passing the numerous flags to the geth binary, you can also pass a
configuration file via:
$ geth --config /path/to/your_config.toml
To get an idea of how the file should look like you can use the dumpconfig subcommand to
export your existing configuration:
$ geth --your-favourite-flags dumpconfig
Docker quick start
One of the quickest ways to get Ethereum up and running on your machine is by using
Docker:
docker run -d --name ethereum-node -v /Users/alice/ethereum:/root \
-p 8545:8545 -p 30303:30303 \
ethereum/client-go
This will start geth in snap-sync mode with a DB memory allowance of 1GB, as the
above command does. It will also create a persistent volume in your home directory for
saving your blockchain as well as map the default ports. There is also an alpine tag
available for a slim version of the image.
Do not forget --http.addr 0.0.0.0, if you want to access RPC from other containers
and/or hosts. By default, geth binds to the local interface and RPC endpoints are not
accessible from the outside.
Programmatically interfacing geth nodes
As a developer, sooner rather than later you'll want to start interacting with geth and the
Ethereum network via your own programs and not manually through the console. To aid
this, geth has built-in support for a JSON-RPC based APIs (standard APIs
and geth specific APIs).
These can be exposed via HTTP, WebSockets and IPC (UNIX sockets on UNIX based
platforms, and named pipes on Windows).
The IPC interface is enabled by default and exposes all the APIs supported by geth,
whereas the HTTP and WS interfaces need to manually be enabled and only expose a
subset of APIs due to security reasons. These can be turned on/off and configured as
you'd expect.
HTTP based JSON-RPC API options:
--http Enable the HTTP-RPC server--http.addr HTTP-RPC server listening interface (default: localhost)--http.port HTTP-RPC server listening port (default: 8545)--http.api API's offered over the HTTP-RPC interface (default: eth,net,web3)--http.corsdomain Comma separated list of domains from which to accept cross-origin requests (browser enforced)--ws Enable the WS-RPC server--ws.addr WS-RPC server listening interface (default: localhost)--ws.port WS-RPC server listening port (default: 8546)--ws.api API's offered over the WS-RPC interface (default: eth,net,web3)--ws.origins Origins from which to accept WebSocket requests--ipcdisable Disable the IPC-RPC server--ipcpath Filename for IPC socket/pipe within the datadir (explicit paths escape it)
You'll need to use your own programming environments' capabilities (libraries, tools, etc) to
connect via HTTP, WS or IPC to a geth node configured with the above flags and you'll
need to speak JSON-RPC on all transports. You
can reuse the same connection for multiple requests!
Note: Please understand the security implications of opening up an HTTP/WS based
transport before doing so! Hackers on the internet are actively trying to subvert
Ethereum nodes with exposed APIs! Further, all browser tabs can access locally
running web servers, so malicious web pages could try to subvert locally available
APIs!
Operating a private network
Maintaining your own private network is more involved as a lot of configurations taken for
granted in the official networks need to be manually set up.
Unfortunately since the Merge it is no longer possible
to easily set up a network of geth nodes without also setting up a corresponding beacon chain.
There are three different solutions depending on your use case:
- If you are looking for a simple way to test smart contracts from go in your CI, you can use the Simulated Backend.
- If you want a convenient single node environment for testing, you can use our Dev Mode.
- If you are looking for a multiple node test network, you can set one up quite easily with Kurtosis.
Contribution
Thank you for considering helping out with the source code! We welcome contributions
from anyone on the internet, and are grateful for even the smallest of fixes!
If you'd like to contribute to go-ethereum, please fork, fix, commit and send a pull request
for the maintainers to review and merge into the main code base. If you wish to submit
more complex changes though, please check up with the core devs first on our Discord Server
to ensure those changes are in line with the general philosophy of the project and/or get
some early feedback which can make both your efforts much lighter as well as our review
and merge procedures quick and simple.
Please make sure your contributions adhere to our coding guidelines:
- Code must adhere to the official Go formatting
guidelines (i.e. uses gofmt).
- Code must be documented adhering to the official Go commentary
guidelines.
- Pull requests need to be based on and opened against the
master branch.
- Commit messages should be prefixed with the package(s) they modify.
- E.g. "eth, rpc: make trace configs optional"
Please see the Developers' Guide
for more details on configuring your environment, managing project dependencies, and
testing procedures.
Contributing to geth.ethereum.org
For contributions to the go-ethereum website, please checkout and raise pull requests against the website branch.
For more detailed instructions please see the website branch README or the
contributing page of the website.
License
The go-ethereum library (i.e. all code outside of the cmd directory) is licensed under the
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0,
also included in our repository in the COPYING.LESSER file.
The go-ethereum binaries (i.e. all code inside of the cmd directory) are licensed under the
GNU General Public License v3.0, also
included in our repository in the COPYING file.
Go-ethereum（geth）是以太坊协议的 Go 语言实现，也是主要的命令行客户端。用它可以运行完整的以太坊节点、同步区块链，并提供 JSON-RPC 接口与网络交互。