Installation

You can install chartplotter from a pre-built binary, with go install, or from source.

Pre-built binaries

1. Go to the Releases page.
2. Download the archive for your operating system and CPU. Builds cover Linux, macOS, and Windows on both amd64 (Intel) and arm64 (Apple Silicon, ARM).
3. Extract the archive.
4. Move the chartplotter binary somewhere on your PATH.

Check that it works:

chartplotter version

With go install

If you have Go 1.26 or newer, install the latest release with one command:

go install github.com/beetlebugorg/chartplotter/cmd/chartplotter@latest

Go places the binary in $(go env GOBIN) (or $(go env GOPATH)/bin). Add that directory to your PATH if it is not there already.

From source

Clone the repository and build it:

git clone https://github.com/beetlebugorg/chartplotter.git
cd chartplotter
make build

The build writes the binary to bin/chartplotter. Run it:

bin/chartplotter version

Requirements

• Go 1.26 or newer to build from source or use go install.
• Nothing extra to run a pre-built binary. The S-101 catalogue is built into the program.

Memory and disk

Baking tiles is the heavy step. It is memory-intensive: a single large cell holds all of its geometry in memory while it builds tiles, so a bake can use several gigabytes of RAM. Memory scales with the size and number of cells you bake at once, and baking many regions in parallel multiplies it. If you run on a small machine, such as a Raspberry Pi, bake one region at a time.

Once the tiles are built, the cost drops sharply. Serving charts streams pre-baked tiles from disk, so a running chartplotter serve uses only modest RAM — well within a small machine's budget. Plan your memory for the bake, not for everyday use.

Baked tiles live in your cache directory (~/.cache/chartplotter). A region is a single .pmtiles archive; size depends on the area and detail, from a few megabytes for one harbor to gigabytes for a whole district.

Next steps

Bake your first chart in the Getting Started guide.