Building Wings

WARNING

Do not run the following steps on your production nodes.

Wings is written in Go. This makes it very easy to modify and compile it on your own, and distribute your own binaries. This guide will cover the steps necessary to build it yourself.

It will not, however, explain where to look for certain aspects of Wings and which changes are necessary to achieve specific results. Knowledge of the Go language is required if you want to modify it.

Building Go programs is very easy, and the same also applies to Wings. Go is cross-platform, but Wings only supports Linux at the moment. The easiest way to compile it for Linux is to run the commands on a Linux machine.

Build Requirements

An up to date version of Go is required to compile Wings. The minimum version can be found at the top of the go.mod (opens new window) file. See the official instructions (opens new window) for help with installing Go.

Building

Execute the following command in your local clone of the repository to compile Wings into a binary.

go build

You should now have a wings binary file in your wings directory.

Install the new binary

Root required

Some the following commands require root permissions. Prepend them with sudo if you are not logged in as root.

1. Backup the current installation of wings

mv /usr/local/bin/wings /usr/local/bin/wings-backup

2. Place the new binary in /usr/local/bin

cp ./wings /usr/local/bin

3. Restart wings

systemctl restart wings

Troubleshooting

If the wings service does not start properly, you can try to start Wings in a console window.

wings --debug

Remember to stop the system service before, and re-enable it afterwards.

systemctl stop wings

systemctl start wings