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Depending on your workflow, you may prefer to install go-livepeer using a binary release, a Docker image, or from source.

Install using a Binary Release

Dependencies

Darwin (macOS)

Linux

Linux GPU

There is a separate binary which supports transcoding on the NVIDIA GPU. The requirement for this binary is to have version 12 of the CUDA Toolkit installed on your machine.

Windows

At this time Livepeer does not provide automatic updates. You can perform a manual update or use a script. A community-created Bash script to update Livepeer is available on the livepeer Forum.

Third-party packages

Packages for different Linux distributions are maintained by Livepeer community members. Before using these packages, please verify that they have been updated to use the latest builds of go-livepeer. This list will be updated as a best-effort, but we cannot guarantee if individual packages are up to date or verify their integrity. In the future, Livepeer core contributors may publish official packages for the distributions below.
PlatformInstallationSource
Arch Linuxparu go-livepeer-binhttps://aur.archlinux.org/packages/go-livepeer-bin/

Install using a Docker image

Prerequisites

If you do not have Docker installed, you will need to install it using the guide here before running the commands below.

Installation

With every release, Docker images are pushed to DockerHub.

Running livepeer-cli with Docker

Once you’ve pulled the image, retrieve the image id and start the container. Any flags you provide will be passed to the binary, so you can pass your configuration flags here.
Once you’ve started the container, retrieve the name and start the CLI

Installing pre-releases with Docker

To pull the latest pre-release version:

Build from source

System dependencies

Building livepeer requires some system dependencies.

Linux (Ubuntu: 16.04 or 18.04)

Linux (Ubuntu: 20.04 or newer)

Linux GPU support

To enable transcoding using Nvidia GPUs on Linux systems
  • CUDA Toolkit must be installed on the system and available on the LIBRARY_PATH
  • clang must be installed as well. The script that will install ffmpeg dependencies uses which clang command to determine whether clang is installed or not. Please check this on your system. If the path is empty, please install clang. For example on the Ubuntu machine one can do

Darwin (macOS)

Go

Building livepeer requires Go. Follow the official Go installation instructions.

Build and install

  1. Clone the repository:
  1. Install ffmpeg dependencies:
  1. Set build environment variables.
Set the PKG_CONFIG_PATH variable so that pkg-config can find the ffmpeg dependency files installed in step 2:
Set the BUILD_TAGS variable to enable mainnet support:
  1. Build and install livepeer:

Troubleshooting

Error while loading shared libraries

You may encounter the following issue when running the livepeer binary.
This means that you have installed the Livepeer GPU binary but it is unable to access your CUDA Toolkit libraries. If you do not intend to use GPU transcoding, please download livepeer instead of livepeer-gpu. However, if you wish to use GPU transcoding, please ensure that the CUDA Toolkit is installed and add its path to the shared libraries path.
Last modified on April 7, 2026