Building from Source

k9-tail is written in Go and compiles to a single static binary with no runtime dependencies.

Prerequisites

• Go 1.21 or later (the module requires Go 1.25.10+)

• Git

Building for the current platform

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/k9io/k9-tail.git
cd k9-tail

# Fetch dependencies
go mod tidy

# Build
./build.sh

The build.sh script produces a statically linked binary with debug symbols stripped:

env CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -ldflags "-s"

The resulting binary is named k9-tail in the project root.

Install after building

sudo mkdir -p /opt/k9/bin
sudo cp k9-tail /opt/k9/bin/k9-tail

Cross-compiling for all platforms

The scripts/build-all script cross-compiles k9-tail for every OS/architecture combination supported by Go, except plan9, iOS, Android, and JavaScript/WASM.

./scripts/build-all

Binaries are written to bin/<os>/k9-tail.<arch>.gz alongside a SHA256 checksum file at bin/<os>/k9-tail.<arch>.gz-sha256.txt.

Supported platforms (examples)

OS	Architectures
Linux	amd64, arm64, arm, i386, ppc64, ppc64le, mips, mips64, s390x, and more
FreeBSD	amd64, arm64, arm, i386
NetBSD	amd64, arm64, arm, i386
OpenBSD	amd64, arm64, arm, i386
Solaris / illumos	amd64
macOS (darwin)	amd64, arm64

Run go tool dist list to see the full list of targets recognized by your Go installation.

Build flags explained

Flag	Purpose
CGO_ENABLED=0	Disables C bindings, producing a fully static binary that runs without glibc or any shared library
-ldflags "-s"	Strips the symbol table from the binary, reducing file size

Dependencies

Module	Purpose
github.com/nxadm/tail	File tailing with log-rotation support
github.com/clarketm/json	JSON marshaling
gopkg.in/yaml.v2	YAML configuration parsing