Install Boundary

5min
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HCP
Boundary

The Boundary CLI must first be installed on your machine to manage your HCP Boundary instance. Boundary is available as source code, as a pre-compiled binary, or in packaged formats.

This tutorial will not cover how to compile Boundary from source, but compiling from source is covered in the README for those who want to be sure they're compiling source they trust into the final binary.

Note

HCP Boundary requires version 0.12.0 to be installed. Previous versions may not function as expected when used with HCP Boundary.

The macOS binary is available to be installed manually or through Homebrew.

To install Boundary, find the appropriate package for your system and download it. Boundary is packaged as a zip archive.

After downloading Boundary, unzip the package. Boundary runs as a single binary named boundary. Make sure that the boundary binary is available on your PATH. You can check the locations available on your path by running this command.

$ echo $PATH

Example output:

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin

The output is a list of locations separated by colons. You can make Boundary available by moving the binary to one of the listed locations, or by adding Boundary's location to your PATH.

Tip

Permanently add a new location to your path by editing your shell's settings file (usually called something like ~/.bashrc, where the part of the file name after the . and before rc is the name of your shell). In that file you will see a line that starts with export PATH=, followed by a colon-separated list of locations. Add the location of the Boundary binary to that list and save the file. Then reload your shell's configuration with the command source ~/.bashrc, replacing bash with the name of your shell.

Homebrew is a free and open-source package management system for Mac OS X. Install the official boundary formula from the terminal.

$ brew install hashicorp/tap/boundary

Note

This installs a signed binary and is automatically updated with every new official release.

To update to the latest, run

$ brew upgrade hashicorp/tap/boundary

The Windows binary is available to be installed manually or through Scoop. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL2) is recommended for Windows users running Boundary, and instructions can be found under the Linux tab.

To install Boundary, find the appropriate package for your system and download it. Boundary is packaged as a zip archive.

After downloading Boundary, unzip the package. Boundary runs as a single binary named boundary. Make sure that the boundary binary is available on your PATH.

Tip: Add a location to your path via the GUI by navigating to Environment Variables in your system settings, and look for the variable called PATH. You will see a semicolon-separated list of locations. Add the Boundary binary's location to that list and then launch a new console window.

Scoop is a free and open-source package management system for Windows. Install Boundary from the command-line.

$ scoop install boundary

Note

The Scoop main bucket repository is NOT maintained by HashiCorp. The latest version of Boundary is always available by manual installation.

HashiCorp officially maintains and signs packages for the following Linux distributions.

Add the HashiCorp GPG key.

$ curl -fsSL https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg | sudo apt-key add -

Add the official HashiCorp Linux repository.

$ sudo apt-add-repository "deb [arch=amd64] https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main"

Update and install.

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install boundary

Install yum-config-manager to manage your repositories.

$ sudo yum install -y yum-utils

Use yum-config-manager to add the official HashiCorp Linux repository.

$ sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/RHEL/hashicorp.repo

Install.

$ sudo yum -y install boundary

Install dnf config-manager to manage your repositories.

$ sudo dnf install -y dnf-plugins-core

Use dnf config-manager to add the official HashiCorp Linux repository.

$ sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/fedora/hashicorp.repo

Install.

sudo dnf -y install boundary

Install yum-config-manager to manage your repositories.

$ sudo yum install -y yum-utils

Use yum-config-manager to add the official HashiCorp Linux repository.

$ sudo yum-config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/AmazonLinux/hashicorp.repo

Install.

$ sudo yum -y install boundary

Tip

Now that you have added the HashiCorp repository, you can install Terraform, Consul, Nomad and Packer with the same command.

Verify the installation

After installing Boundary, verify the installation worked by opening a new command prompt or console, and checking that boundary is available.

Tip

If you receive an error that Boundary is not found, try logging out and logging back in to your system (particularly necessary sometimes for Windows).

$ boundary
Usage: boundary <command> [args]

Commands:
    accounts           Manage Boundary accounts
    auth-methods       Manage Boundary auth-methods
    auth-tokens        Manage Boundary auth-tokens
    authenticate       Authenticate the Boundary command-line client
    config             Manage resources related to Boundary's local configuration
    connect            Authorize a session against a target and launch a proxied connection
    database           Manage Boundary's database
    dev                Start a Boundary dev environment
    groups             Manage Boundary groups
    host-catalogs      Manage Boundary host-catalogs
    host-sets          Manage Boundary host-sets
    hosts              Manage Boundary hosts
    proxy              Launch the Boundary CLI in proxy mode
    roles              Manage Boundary roles
    scopes             Manage Boundary scopes
    server             Start a Boundary server
    sessions           Manage Boundary sessions
    targets            Manage Boundary targets
    users              Manage Boundary users

Verify the version of Boundary.

$ boundary version

Version information:
  Git Revision:        034f27ec8528251ce23b5afbf3851c48b0c54bec
  Version Number:      0.12.0

You have successfully downloaded and installed Boundary! Continue to the next tutorial to continue with HCP Boundary.

What is HCP Boundary?

Create a Boundary instance on HCP