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. For running etcd on a cloud provider, see the Example hardware configuration documentation.
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.
For those wanting to try the very latest version, build etcd from the master branch. Go version 1.9+ is required to build the latest version of etcd. To ensure etcd is built against well-tested libraries, etcd vendors its dependencies for official release binaries. However, etcd's vendoring is also optional to avoid potential import conflicts when embedding the etcd server or using the etcd client.
To build etcd from the master branch without a GOPATH using the official build script:
$ git clone https://github.com/coreos/etcd.git
$ cd etcd
$ ./buildTo build a vendored etcd from the master branch via go get:
# GOPATH should be set
$ echo $GOPATH
/Users/example/go
$ go get github.com/coreos/etcd/cmd/etcdTo build etcd from the master branch without vendoring (may not build due to upstream conflicts):
# GOPATH should be set
$ echo $GOPATH
/Users/example/go
$ go get github.com/coreos/etcdCheck the etcd binary is built correctly by starting etcd and setting a key.
If etcd is built without using GOPATH, run the following:
$ ./bin/etcd
If etcd is built using GOPATH, run the following:
$ $GOPATH/bin/etcd
Run the following:
$ ETCDCTL_API=3 ./bin/etcdctl put foo bar
OK
If OK is printed, then etcd is working!