# About Tahoe

Welcome to the Tahoe project, a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant filesystem.

See the about page for more information.

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# How To Install Tahoe

This procedure has been verified to work on Windows, Cygwin, Mac, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD. It's likely to work on other platforms. If you have trouble with this install process, please write to the tahoe-dev mailing list, where friendly hackers will help you out.

## Install Python

Follow the instructions on the Python download page to download and install Python v2. (Note: Python v3 will not work.)

## Get Tahoe

Download a recent zip file from here:

    http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/snapshots

## Build Tahoe

Unpack the zip file and cd into the top-level directory.

Run python setup.py build_tahoe to build and to install the tahoe executable into a subdirectory of the current directory named bin.

Run python trial to verify that it built correctly and passes all tests.

Run bin/tahoe --version to verify that the executable tool runs and prints out the right version number (the "allmydata" version number is the version number of the Tahoe package).

## Run

Now you have the Tahoe source code installed and are ready to use it to form a decentralized filesystem. The tahoe executable in the bin directory can configure and launch your Tahoe node. See running.html for instructions on how to do that.

## More Details

For more details, including platform-specific hints for debian, windows, and Mac systems, please see the InstallDetails wiki page.