All Beats are written in Go, so having Go installed and knowing the basics are prerequisites for understanding this guide. But don’t worry if you aren’t a Go expert. Go is a relatively new language, and very few people are experts in it. In fact, several people learned Go by contributing to Packetbeat and libbeat, including the original Packetbeat authors.

Before you begin: Set up your Go environment as described under Setting Up Your Dev Environment in Contributing to Beats.

To build your Beat on a specific version of libbeat, check out the specific branch (7.3 in the example below):

cd ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/elastic/beats
git checkout 7.3