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Boundary
HCP quick start

Install the Boundary CLI

  • 5min
  • |
  • HCP
  • Boundary

To manage your HCP Boundary instance, install the Boundary command-line interface (CLI). 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 you can learn about compiling from source in the README to ensure you compile source into a trusted final binary.

The macOS binary can be installed manually or using 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.

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:
  Build Date:          2024-10-10T15:04:49Z
  Git Revision:        2e3fdb718cb5ed20017b124deb6f438310b9dd0f
  Version Number:      0.18.0

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

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