# Download and build

## System requirements

The etcd performance benchmarks run etcd on 8 vCPU, 16GB RAM, 50GB SSD GCE instances, but any relatively modern machine with low latency storage and a few gigabytes of memory should suffice for most use cases. Applications with large v2 data stores will require more memory than a large v3 data store since data is kept in anonymous memory instead of memory mapped from a file. than For running etcd on a cloud provider, we suggest at least a medium instance on AWS or a standard-1 instance on GCE.

## Download the pre-built binary

The easiest way to get etcd is to use one of the pre-built release binaries which are available for OSX, Linux, Windows, appc, and Docker. Instructions for using these binaries are on the [GitHub releases page][github-release].

## Build the latest version

For those wanting to try the very latest version, build etcd from the `master` branch.
[Go](https://golang.org/) version 1.5+ is required to build the latest version of etcd.

Here are the commands to build an etcd binary from the `master` branch:

```
# go is required
$ go version
go version go1.6 darwin/amd64

# GOPATH should be set correctly
$ echo $GOPATH
/Users/example/go

$ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/coreos
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/coreos
$ git clone github.com:coreos/etcd.git
$ cd etcd
$ ./build
$ ./bin/etcd
...
```

## Test the installation

Check the etcd binary is built correctly by starting etcd and setting a key.

Start etcd:

```
$ ./bin/etcd
```

Set a key:

```
$ ETCDCTL_API=3 ./bin/etcdctl put foo bar
OK
```

If OK is printed, then etcd is working!

[github-release]: https://github.com/coreos/etcd/releases/
[go]: https://golang.org/doc/install
