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Currently, you can download the DFINITY Canister Software Development Kit (SDK) directly from within a terminal shell on your local computer. With this installation option, you can be logged on as any user and no additional software is required.

Install the latest directly from a terminal

To download and install from a terminal shell:

  1. Open a terminal shell on your local computer.

    For example, on macOS open the Applications folder, then open Utilities and double-click Terminal.

  2. Download and install the SDK package by running the following curl command:

    sh -ci "$(curl -fsSL https://sdk.dfinity.org/install.sh)"

Install a specific version from a terminal

If you want to install a specific version, for example, to test against a previous version, you can modify the installation command to include a version.

To download and install a specific version from a terminal shell:

  1. Open a terminal shell on your local computer.

  2. Set the DFX_VERSION environment variable to the version of the DFINITY Canister SDK package you want to install as a prefix to curl command.

    For example, to install version 0.6.26, you would run the following command:

    DFX_VERSION=0.6.26 sh -ci "$(curl -fsSL https://sdk.dfinity.org/install.sh)"
If you are using the DFX_VERSION environment variable to install a version of the DFINITY Canister SDK not yet publicly available, see this article for an overview of what’s changed.

Next steps

For information about the next steps to take, see Tutorials in the SDK Developer Tools.

To learn more about writing programs for the Internet Computer before you start experimenting with code, see Concepts.

For information about writing programs for the Internet Computer using Motoko, see the Motoko Programming Language Guide.