Building from Source

k9-ssh is a standard Go module. Building from source requires Go 1.22 or later.

Quick Build

git clone https://github.com/k9io/k9-ssh.git
cd k9-ssh
go build -o k9-ssh .

The resulting k9-ssh binary is statically linked (CGO_ENABLED=0 is the default for pure-Go builds) and has no runtime dependencies on system libraries.

Using the Build Script

The included build.sh script embeds the current git tag as the version string:

./build.sh

This is equivalent to:

VERSION=$(git describe --tags --abbrev=0 2>/dev/null || echo "dev")
go build -ldflags "-X main.version=${VERSION}" -o k9-ssh .

Cross-Platform Builds

scripts/build-all compiles k9-ssh for every supported OS and architecture combination, producing gzip-compressed binaries and SHA-256 checksums in the bin/ directory.

./scripts/build-all

Output layout:

bin/
├── linux/
│   ├── k9-ssh.amd64.gz
│   ├── k9-ssh.amd64.gz-sha256.txt
│   ├── k9-ssh.arm64.gz
│   ├── k9-ssh.arm64.gz-sha256.txt
│   └── ...
├── freebsd/
│   ├── k9-ssh.amd64.gz
│   └── ...
├── openbsd/
│   └── ...
└── ...

Supported OS / Architecture Matrix

OS	Architectures
Linux	amd64, arm64, i386, armv6, armv7, riscv64, mips, mipsle, mips64, mips64le, s390x, ppc64le
FreeBSD	amd64, arm64, i386
OpenBSD	amd64, arm64
NetBSD	amd64, arm64
Solaris	amd64
macOS (darwin)	amd64, arm64

Running Tests

go test ./...

Tests cover configuration loading and validation, API response parsing, username validation, and key format validation. All tests run without network access — API calls are mocked via an embedded httptest server.

Dependencies

Module	Version	Purpose
golang.org/x/crypto	v0.52.0+	SSH key parsing and validation
gopkg.in/yaml.v3	v3.0.1+	YAML configuration parsing
golang.org/x/sys	v0.45.0+	Transitive (required by x/crypto)

Fetch all dependencies with:

go mod tidy

Verifying a Release Binary

Every release binary ships with a SHA-256 checksum file. Verify before installing:

# Linux example
sha256sum -c k9-ssh.amd64.gz-sha256.txt

# macOS
shasum -a 256 -c k9-ssh.amd64.gz-sha256.txt

# FreeBSD / OpenBSD
sha256 -c k9-ssh.amd64.gz-sha256.txt