Installation

Ubuntu

Recommended Geth Version: 1.10.26-stable

The easiest way to install Geth on Ubuntu-based distributions is with the built-in launchpad PPAs (Personal Package Archives). A single PPA repository is provided, containing stable and development releases for Ubuntu versions: xenial, trusty, impish, focal, bionic.

The following command enables the launchpad repository:

sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ethereum/ethereum

Then, to install the stable version of go-ethereum:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ethereum

Updating an existing Geth installation to the latest version can be achieved by stopping the node and running the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ethereum
sudo apt-get upgrade geth

When the node is started again, Geth will automatically use all the data from the previous version and sync the blocks that were missed while the node was offline.

Docker

There four different Docker images available for running the latest stable or development versions of Geth.

• ethereum/client-go:latest is the latest development version of Geth (default)

• ethereum/client-go:stable is the latest stable version of Geth

• ethereum/client-go:{version} is the stable version of Geth at a specific version number

• ethereum/client-go:release-{version} is the latest stable version of Geth at a specific version family

Pulling an image and starting a node is achieved by running these commands:

docker pull ethereum/client-go
docker run -it -p 30303:30303 ethereum/client-go

There are also four different Docker images for running the latest stable or development versions of miscellaneous Ethereum tools.

• ethereum/client-go:alltools-latest is the latest development version of the Ethereum tools

• ethereum/client-go:alltools-stable is the latest stable version of the Ethereum tools

• ethereum/client-go:alltools-{version} is the stable version of the Ethereum tools at a specific version number

• ethereum/client-go:alltools-release-{version} is the latest stable version of the Ethereum tools at a specific version family

The image has the following ports automatically exposed:

• 8545 TCP, used by the HTTP based JSON RPC API

• 8546 TCP, used by the WebSocket based JSON RPC API

• 8547 TCP, used by the GraphQL API

• 30303 TCP and UDP, used by the P2P protocol running the network

Note: if you are running an Ethereum client inside a Docker container, you should mount a data volume as the client's data directory (located at /root/.ethereum inside the container) to ensure that downloaded data is preserved between restarts and/or container life-cycles.

Updating Geth to the latest version simply requires stopping the container, pulling the latest version from Docker and running it:

docker stop ethereum/client-go
docker pull ethereum/client-go:latest
docker run -it -p 30303:30303 ethereum/client-go