Building from Source

Prerequisites

The tray binary requires CGO and libayatana-appindicator. See System Tray: Build requirements for per-distro package names.

Go is required to build from source. The released binary has no runtime dependencies.

Web UI: the lerd-ui dashboard is built from Svelte sources under internal/ui/web/ and bundled into the Go binary via //go:embed. Node.js (20+) and npm are required to rebuild it. make build runs npm install (once) and npm run build automatically before the Go build, so a single make command still produces a self-contained binary. If you only change Go code, you can skip the JS build by running go build directly against a previously-built internal/ui/web/dist/ tree.

Build commands

make build       # → ./build/lerd  (CGO, with tray support; builds UI first)
make build-nogui # → ./build/lerd-nogui  (no CGO, no tray)
make build-ui    # rebuild only the web UI (internal/ui/web/dist/)
make install     # build + install to ~/.local/bin/lerd
make test        # go test ./...
make test-ui     # run Vitest suite for the web UI
make test-all    # test + test-ui + test-installer (bats)
make clean       # remove ./build/ and internal/ui/web/dist/

Cross-compile for arm64

Without tray (no CGO required):

CGO_ENABLED=0 GOARCH=arm64 GOOS=linux go build -tags nogui -o ./build/lerd-arm64 ./cmd/lerd

The UI only needs to be built once per source-tree state; the emitted dist/ is architecture-independent.

Developing the web UI

cd internal/ui/web
npm install            # once
npm run dev            # Vite dev server at http://localhost:5173 (proxies /api/* to 7073)
npm run check          # svelte-check + tsc
npm test               # Vitest

The Vite dev server proxies /api/*, /icons/*, /manifest.webmanifest, /sw.js, and /offline.html to a running lerd-ui on :7073, so you get hot-reload on the Svelte side while the Go backend handles the data. Run lerd start (or make install once) first so the backend is up.

Installing a local build

To test a local build end-to-end using the installer:

make build
bash install.sh --local ./build/lerd

This runs the full installer flow (prerequisite checks, PATH setup, lerd install) using your locally built binary instead of downloading from GitHub.