This is useful if you intend to actively work on the registry.
### Alternatives
Most people should use the [official Registry docker image](https://hub.docker.com/r/library/registry/).
People looking for advanced operational use cases might consider rolling their own image with a custom Dockerfile inheriting `FROM registry:2`.
OS X users who want to run natively can do so following [the instructions here](https://github.com/docker/docker.github.io/blob/master/registry/recipes/osx-setup-guide.md).
### Gotchas
You are expected to know your way around with go & git.
If you are a casual user with no development experience, and no preliminary knowledge of go, building from source is probably not a good solution for you.
## Build the development environment
The first prerequisite of properly building distribution targets is to have a Go
development environment setup. Please follow [How to Write Go Code](https://golang.org/doc/code.html)
for proper setup. If done correctly, you should have a GOROOT and GOPATH set in the
environment.
If a Go development environment is setup, one can use `go get` to install the
`registry` command from the current latest:
go get github.com/docker/distribution/cmd/registry
The above will install the source repository into the `GOPATH`.
Now create the directory for the registry data (this might require you to set permissions properly)
mkdir -p /var/lib/registry
... or alternatively `export REGISTRY_STORAGE_FILESYSTEM_ROOTDIRECTORY=/somewhere` if you want to store data into another location.
