How to Properly Install Chrome From the Command-Line

1. Introduction

Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser first released in 2008 for the Microsoft Windows operating system. More versions were later released for Linux, macOS, iOS, and Android, where it’s the default web browser.

It’s one of the most powerful web browsers and the main component of chromeOS, serving as the platform for web applications.

In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to correctly install Chrome from the command-line on Linux for 64-bit Linux architectures. Chrome is no longer supported on 32-bit Linux architectures.

2. Installation on Ubuntu-based Distros

To install Chrome on Linux with the local package manager, we need to first update the package index to make sure the system is up to date:

$ sudo apt update

This updates the package cache. Then we can upgrade the packages to the new version:

$ sudo apt upgrade

To install Chrome, we need to use GNU Wget. It’s a program that retrieves content from web servers and is available by default on most Linux distros.

Let’s check if we have GNU Wget available on the system:

$ wget --version
GNU Wget 1.20.3 built on linux-gnu.

-cares +digest -gpgme +https +ipv6 +iri +large-file -metalink +nls 
+ntlm +opie +psl +ssl/openssl 

If we don’t get an output after running the above command, we need to install GNU Wget:

$ sudo apt install wget

After installation, let’s use the wget command to download the latest package version of Chrome:

$ wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

We can then use the dpkg Linux tool to install Chrome from the downloaded package:

$ sudo dpkg -i google-chrome-stable_current_amd64.deb

In case we encounter any errors during the installation process, we’d need to run this command to fix them:

$ sudo apt-get install -f

Finally, we can type in this command to launch the Chrome browser from the terminal:

$ google-chrome

The browser pops open, and we can begin signing in using our Google account.

3. Installation on Arch-based Distros

Arch-based distros don’t have a package available on the official Google Chrome website. However, Chrome is available on Arch User Repository (AUR) for Arch, Manjaro, and other Arch-based distros.

We can install Google Chrome using an AUR helper or use Git to install Chrome without using the AUR helper.

3.1. Installation With AUR Helper

While there are a lot of AUR helpers available, for this example, we’ll use the yay AUR helper.

Let’s install it in case it’s not available on the system.

We first install the base-devel package:

$ sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git

We’re using the base-devel option to compile all essential tools from the source.

Then we can clone the yay repo:

$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/yay-git.git

This creates a new directory with the name yay. Let’s navigate into the directory:

$ cd yay

Then we can install the yay AUR helper:

$ makepkg -si

After installation, let’s use yay to install Chrome:

$ yay -S google-chrome

The yay command fetches all available Google Chrome packages and we can select the version to install.

We can also easily upgrade to the latest version using yay:

$ yay -Syu

This command upgrades all AUR and official packages.

3.2. Installation Without AUR Helper

The first step is to install the base-devel package:

$ sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git

Then we can clone Google Chrome:

$ git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/google-chrome.git

This creates a new directory named google-chrome. 

Let’s navigate into the directory:

$ cd google-chrome

Then we can install Google Chrome:

$ makepkg -si

To upgrade Chrome, we first do a git pull before installing the package again:

$ git pull && makepkg -si

4. Conclusion

In this article, we explored how to install Google Chrome from the command-line on Ubuntu and Arch-based Linux distros. On Ubuntu-based Linux distros, we used wget to download the latest version before installing.

On Arch-based distros, we saw that we can install Google Chrome using an AUR helper or without using it. Using an AUR helper is faster and makes it easier to upgrade.