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One of the best things about buying a Nexus device is that it’s easy and you are actively encouraged to unlock the bootloader. Here’s how you get started on your Nexus 5.

You need to have fastboot and ADB installed on your computer,which are part of the Android SDK

from developer.android.com/sdk/index.html. Enable USB debugging, and from the command line/terminal type ‘adb reboot bootloader’ and ‘fastboot oem unlock’.

After your device is unlocked, you can again use fastboot to flash a custom recovery. TWRP, one

of the most popular options, can be found for the Nexus 5 at teamw.in/project/twrp2/205. Use ‘fastboot flash filename.img’ in bootloader to flash. Use ‘fastboot reboot’ to start up the device.

After you’ve unlocked your device and installed a custom recovery, the final step for gaining root access is installing a Superuser application. SuperSU seems to offer the best compatibility with KitKat at this time – download the zip file from http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread, ‘adb push’ it to the internal SD card and use ‘adb reboot recovery’ to reboot and install.