Install Hyperledger Besu On Linux For Beginners

Today, I read the documentation of Hyperledger Besu. It’s nice but they assume all Linux users have experience with environment variables and usage of binary packages. So I created this article for a Linux beginner to run Besu on their machine.

Download Binary File And Extract It

The only prerequisite you need for this article is Java if you don’t have it run this command

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install openjdk-11-jdk

First, you need to download the binary distribution from Pegasys choose the .tar.gz file. Now we will make some operations as a root user. The easiest way is to access your GUI as root user by running this command

sudo -i nautilus

A screen will pop to you on your home directory with root access. Now you can do any operations on directories with root access now go to ‘opt’ directory then extract your binary file on it. Rename your extracted folder fromhyperledger-besu-x-x-x to besu only.

check everything works correctly by this command

/opt/besu/bin/besu --help

It should give you a list of commands options.

Add Environment Variable

It’s not fun to write /opt/besu/bin/besu each time you need to run a besu command it will be better to make write besu only. To do that go to .bashrc (the file where you define environment variables)

nano .bashrc

the file will open add this line

export PATH=/opt/besu/bin:$PATH

Now refresh your file

source .bashrc

Try to run the same command again like this

besu --help

It should work now. That it! congratulations now you can use besu commands.