Installation

Aperture ships as a single, statically linked binary with no runtime dependencies. It is pure Go with CGO_ENABLED=0 end to end — there is no C toolchain, no external policy engine, and nothing to install alongside it. Build it from source and you get one file, bin/aperture, that runs anywhere the Go build targets.

Prerequisites

Build from source

Clone the repository and build the binary with the provided target:

git clone https://github.com/frankbardon/aperture.git
cd aperture
make build

make build compiles the aperture command with CGO_ENABLED=0, -trimpath, and -ldflags="-s -w", writing the result to bin/aperture. Confirm the binary works:

bin/aperture --version

aperture version <version>

Build directly with go

If you prefer not to use make, the equivalent invocation is:

CGO_ENABLED=0 go build -trimpath -ldflags="-s -w" -o bin/aperture ./cmd/aperture

The cmd/aperture/main.go entrypoint is a thin adapter: it only stamps the version and hands off to the CLI command tree. All behavior lives in the library packages at the module root.

Put it on your PATH (optional)

The examples in this book invoke the binary as bin/aperture from the repository root. To run aperture from anywhere, copy the binary onto your PATH:

cp bin/aperture /usr/local/bin/aperture
aperture --version

Verify the toolchain

Aperture keeps CGO_ENABLED=0 and stays free of any CGO dependency (no geo/h3, no SQLite C bindings — the SQLite backend uses the pure-Go modernc.org/sqlite). If a build fails complaining about a C compiler, an environment variable is forcing CGO on; clear it and rebuild:

CGO_ENABLED=0 make build

Where to go next

• Concepts — the vocabulary the rest of the book assumes.
• First decision (CLI) — run aperture check against the built-in example model.
• Library quickstart — embed the decision engine in a Go program.