1.2.2 The concourse CLI

The concourse CLI can be downloaded from the latest GitHub release - make sure to grab the appropriate archive for your platform. Each concourse-* archive contains the following files:

concourse/bin/concourse
concourse/bin/gdn            # Linux only
concourse/fly-assets/...
concourse/resource-types/... # Linux only

The Linux release is the largest among all the platforms because it is prepackaged with a bundle of resource types like the git, time, and registry-image resources. Resources only run on Linux workers, that's why the other platforms are not bundled with resources; resources don't currently exist for non-linux platforms.

When extracted, the concourse binary will auto-discover its sibling assets based on its file location, so you may extract it anywhere. On Linux a typical install location is /usr/local/concourse:

tar -zxf concourse-*.tgz -C /usr/local

From there, you can either add /usr/local/concourse/bin to your $PATH, or just execute /usr/local/concourse/bin/concourse directly.

Configuring concourse

All Concourse web and worker node configuration is defined statically via flags. For a full list of flags, you can pass --help to any command.

concourse web --help
concourse worker --help
concourse quickstart --help
concourse migrate --help
concourse generate-key --help
concourse land-worker --help
concourse retire-worker --help

Each flag can also be set via an environment variable. The env var for each flag is based on the flag name uppercased, preceded with CONCOURSE_ and dashes (-) replaced with underscores (_). These are also shown in --help.

Various sections in documentation may refer to configuration via env vars rather than flags, but they are both equivalent and interchangeable. Env vars are simply easier to reference in isolation and are more useful to copy-paste.