Installation¶

Packages¶

Note that if at any point the package you’re trying to use is outdated, you always have the option to use an official binary from the restic project.

These are up to date binaries, built in a reproducible and verifiable way, that you can download and run without having to do additional installation work.

Please see the Official Binaries section below for various downloads.

Mac OS X¶

If you are using Mac OS X, you can install restic using the homebrew package manager:

$ brew install restic

Arch Linux¶

On Arch Linux, there is a package called restic-git which can be installed from AUR, e.g. with pacaur:

$ pacaur -S restic-git

Nix & NixOS¶

If you are using Nix or NixOS there is a package available named restic. It can be installed uisng nix-env:

$ nix-env --install restic

Debian¶

On Debian, there’s a package called restic which can be installed from the official repos, e.g. with apt-get:

$ apt-get install restic

Warning

Please be aware that, at the time of writing, Debian stable has restic version 0.3.3 which is very old. The testing and unstable branches have recent versions of restic.

RHEL & CentOS¶

restic can be installed via copr repository, for RHEL7/CentOS you can try the following:

$ yum install yum-plugin-copr
$ yum copr enable copart/restic
$ yum install restic

If that doesn’t work, you can try adding the repository directly, for CentOS6 use:

$ yum-config-manager --add-repo https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/copart/restic/repo/epel-6/copart-restic-epel-6.repo

For CentOS7 use:

$ yum-config-manager --add-repo https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/copart/restic/repo/epel-7/copart-restic-epel-7.repo

Fedora¶

restic can be installed via copr repository.

$ dnf install dnf-plugin-core
$ dnf copr enable copart/restic
$ dnf install restic

Solus¶

restic can be installed from the official repo of Solus via the eopkg package manager:

$ eopkg install restic

OpenBSD¶

On OpenBSD 6.3 and greater, you can install restic using pkg_add:

# pkg_add restic

Official Binaries¶

Stable Releases¶

You can download the latest stable release versions of restic from the restic release page. These builds are considered stable and releases are made regularly in a controlled manner.

There’s both pre-compiled binaries for different platforms as well as the source code available for download. Just download and run the one matching your system.

Unstable Builds¶

Another option is to use the latest builds for the master branch, available on the restic beta download site. These too are pre-compiled and ready to run, and a new version is built every time a push is made to the master branch.

Windows¶

On Windows, put the restic.exe into %SystemRoot%System32 to use restic in scripts without the need for absolute paths to the binary. This requires Admin rights.

Docker Container¶

We’re maintaining a bare docker container with just a few files and the restic binary, you can get it with docker pull like this:

$ docker pull restic/restic

Note

Another docker container which offers more configuration options is
available as a contribution (Thank you!). You can find it at
https://github.com/Lobaro/restic-backup-docker

From Source¶

restic is written in the Go programming language and you need at least Go version 1.9. Building restic may also work with older versions of Go, but that’s not supported. See the Getting started guide of the Go project for instructions how to install Go.

In order to build restic from source, execute the following steps:

$ git clone https://github.com/restic/restic
[...]

$ cd restic

$ go run build.go

You can easily cross-compile restic for all supported platforms, just supply the target OS and platform via the command-line options like this (for Windows and FreeBSD respectively):

$ go run build.go --goos windows --goarch amd64

$ go run build.go --goos freebsd --goarch 386

$ go run build.go --goos linux --goarch arm --goarm 6

The resulting binary is statically linked and does not require any libraries.

At the moment, the only tested compiler for restic is the official Go compiler. Building restic with gccgo may work, but is not supported.

Autocompletion¶

Restic can write out man pages and bash/zsh compatible autocompletion scripts:

$ ./restic generate --help

The "generate" command writes automatically generated files like the man pages
and the auto-completion files for bash and zsh).

Usage:
  restic generate [command] [flags]

Flags:
      --bash-completion file   write bash completion file
  -h, --help                   help for generate
      --man directory          write man pages to directory
      --zsh-completion file    write zsh completion file

Example for using sudo to write a bash completion script directly to the system-wide location:

$ sudo ./restic generate --bash-completion /etc/bash_completion.d/restic
writing bash completion file to /etc/bash_completion.d/restic