Install Netdata on Linux from a Git checkout

To install the latest git version of Netdata, please follow these 2 steps:

1. Prepare your system

   Install the required packages on your system.

2. Install Netdata

   Download and install Netdata. You can also update it the same way.

Prepare your system

Before you begin, make sure that your repo and the repo's submodules are clean from any previous builds and up to date. Otherwise, perform a cleanup

Use our automatic requirements installer (no need to be root), which attempts to find the packages that should be installed on your system to build and run Netdata. It supports a large variety of major Linux distributions and other operating systems and is regularly tested. You can find this tool here or run it directly with bash <(curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/netdata/netdata/master/packaging/installer/install-required-packages.sh). Otherwise read on for how to get requires packages manually:

• Alpine Linux and its derivatives

  • You have to install bash yourself, before using the installer.

• Gentoo Linux and its derivatives

• Debian Linux and its derivatives (including Ubuntu, Mint)

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its derivatives (including Fedora, CentOS, Amazon Machine Image)

  • Please note that for RHEL/CentOS you need EPEL. In addition, RHEL/CentOS version 6 also need OKay for package libuv version 1.
  • CentOS 8 / RHEL 8 requires a bit of extra work. See the dedicated section below.

• SUSE Linux and its derivatives (including openSUSE)

• SLE12 Must have your system registered with SUSE Customer Center or have the DVD. See #1162

Install the packages for having a basic Netdata installation (system monitoring and many applications, without mysql / mariadb, named, hardware sensors and SNMP):

curl -Ss 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/netdata/netdata/master/packaging/installer/install-required-packages.sh' >/tmp/install-required-packages.sh && bash /tmp/install-required-packages.sh -i netdata

Install all the required packages for monitoring everything Netdata can monitor:

curl -Ss 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/netdata/netdata/master/packaging/installer/install-required-packages.sh' >/tmp/install-required-packages.sh && bash /tmp/install-required-packages.sh -i netdata-all

If the above do not work for you, please open a github issue with a copy of the message you get on screen. We are trying to make it work everywhere (this is also why the script reports back success or failure for all its runs).

---

This is how to do it by hand:

# Debian / Ubuntu
apt-get install zlib1g-dev uuid-dev libuv1-dev liblz4-dev libssl-dev libelf-dev libmnl-dev libprotobuf-dev protobuf-compiler gcc g++ make git autoconf autoconf-archive autogen automake pkg-config curl python cmake

# Fedora
dnf install zlib-devel libuuid-devel libuv-devel lz4-devel openssl-devel elfutils-libelf-devel libmnl-devel protobuf-devel protobuf-compiler gcc gcc-c++ make git autoconf autoconf-archive autogen automake pkgconfig curl findutils python cmake

# CentOS / Red Hat Enterprise Linux
yum install autoconf automake curl gcc gcc-c++ git libmnl-devel libuuid-devel openssl-devel libuv-devel lz4-devel elfutils-libelf-devel protobuf protobuf-devel protobuf-compiler make nc pkgconfig python zlib-devel cmake

# openSUSE
zypper install zlib-devel libuuid-devel libuv-devel liblz4-devel libopenssl-devel libelf-devel libmnl-devel protobuf-devel gcc gcc-c++ make git autoconf autoconf-archive autogen automake pkgconfig curl findutils python cmake

Once Netdata is compiled, to run it the following packages are required (already installed using the above commands):

package	description
libuuid	part of util-linux for GUIDs management
zlib	gzip compression for the internal Netdata web server
libuv	Multi-platform support library with a focus on asynchronous I/O, version 1 or greater

Netdata will fail to start without the above.

Netdata plugins and various aspects of Netdata can be enabled or benefit when these are installed (they are optional):

package	description
bash	for shell plugins and alert notifications
curl	for shell plugins and alert notifications
iproute or iproute2	for monitoring Linux traffic QoS use iproute2 if iproute reports as not available or obsolete
python	for most of the external plugins
python-yaml	used for monitoring beanstalkd
python-beanstalkc	used for monitoring beanstalkd
python-mysqldb or python-pymysql	used for monitoring mysql or mariadb databases python-mysqldb is a lot faster and thus preferred
nodejs	used for node.js plugins for monitoring named and SNMP devices
lm-sensors	for monitoring hardware sensors
libelf	for monitoring kernel-level metrics using eBPF
libmnl	for collecting netfilter metrics
netcat	for shell plugins to collect metrics from remote systems

Netdata will greatly benefit if you have the above packages installed, but it will still work without them.

Netdata DB engine can be enabled when these are installed (they are optional):

package	description
liblz4	Extremely fast compression algorithm, version r129 or greater
openssl	Cryptography and SSL/TLS toolkit

Netdata will greatly benefit if you have the above packages installed, but it will still work without them.

Netdata Cloud support may require the following packages to be installed:

package	description
cmake	Needed at build time if you aren't using your distribution's version of libwebsockets or are building on a platform other than Linux
openssl	Needed to secure communications with the Netdata Cloud
protobuf	Used for the new Cloud<->Agent binary protocol

Netdata will greatly benefit if you have the above packages installed, but it will still work without them.

CentOS / RHEL 6.x

On CentOS / RHEL 6.x, many of the dependencies for Netdata are only available with versions older than what we need, so special setup is required if manually installing packages.

CentOS 6.x:

• Enable the EPEL repo
• Enable the additional repo from okay.network

And install the minimum required dependencies.

CentOS / RHEL 8.x

For CentOS / RHEL 8.x a lot of development packages have moved out into their own separate repositories. Some other dependencies are either missing completely or have to be sourced by 3rd-parties.

CentOS 8.x:

• Enable the PowerTools repo
• Enable the EPEL repo
• Enable the Extra repo from OKAY

And install the minimum required dependencies:

# Enable config-manager
yum install -y 'dnf-command(config-manager)'

# Enable PowerTools
yum config-manager --set-enabled powertools

# Enable EPEL
yum install -y epel-release

# Install Repo for libuv-devl (NEW)
yum install -y http://repo.okay.com.mx/centos/8/x86_64/release/okay-release-1-3.el8.noarch.rpm

# Install Devel Packages
yum install autoconf automake curl gcc git cmake libuuid-devel openssl-devel libuv-devel lz4-devel make nc pkgconfig python3 zlib-devel

Install Netdata

Do this to install and run Netdata:

# download it - the directory 'netdata' will be created
git clone https://github.com/netdata/netdata.git --depth=100 --recursive
cd netdata

# run script with root privileges to build, install, start Netdata
./netdata-installer.sh

• If you don't want to run it straight-away, add --dont-start-it option.

• You can also append --stable-channel to fetch and install only the official releases from GitHub, instead of the nightly builds.

• If you don't want to install it on the default directories, you can run the installer like this: ./netdata-installer.sh --install-prefix /opt. This one will install Netdata in /opt/netdata.

• If your server does not have access to the internet and you have manually put the installation directory on your server, you will need to pass the option --disable-go to the installer. The option will prevent the installer from attempting to download and install go.d.plugin.

Optional parameters to alter your installation

netdata-installer.sh accepts a few parameters to customize your installation:

• --dont-wait: Enable automated installs by not prompting for permission to install any required packages.
• --dont-start-it: Prevent the installer from starting Netdata automatically.
• --stable-channel: Automatically update only on the release of new major versions.
• --nightly-channel: Automatically update on every new nightly build.
• --disable-telemetry: Opt-out of anonymous statistics we use to make Netdata better.
• --no-updates: Prevent automatic updates of any kind.
• --reinstall: If an existing install is detected, reinstall instead of trying to update it. Note that this cannot be used to change installation types.
• --local-files: Used for offline installations. Pass four file paths: the Netdata tarball, the checksum file, the go.d plugin tarball, and the go.d plugin config tarball, to force kickstart run the process using those files. This option conflicts with the --stable-channel option. If you set this and--stable-channel, Netdata will use the local files.

Connect node to Netdata Cloud during installation

Unlike the kickstart.sh, the netdata-installer.sh script does not allow you to automatically connect your node to Netdata Cloud immediately after installation.

See the connect to Netdata Cloud doc for details on connecting a node with a manual installation of Netdata.

'nonrepresentable section on output' errors

Our current build process unfortunately has some issues when using certain configurations of the clang C compiler on Linux.

If the installation fails with errors like /bin/ld: externaldeps/libwebsockets/libwebsockets.a(context.c.o): relocation R_X86_64_32 against '.rodata.str1.1' can not be used when making a PIE object; recompile with -fPIC, and you are trying to build with clang on Linux, you will need to build Netdata using GCC to get a fully functional install.

In most cases, you can do this by running CC=gcc ./netdata-installer.sh.

Perform a cleanup in your netdata repo

The Netdata repo consist of the main git tree and it's submodules. Either working on a fork or on the main repo you need to make sure that there are no "leftover" artifacts from previous builds and that your submodules are up to date to the corresponding checkouts.

Important: Make sure that you have committed any work in progress, before you proceed the with the clean up instruction below

git clean -dfx && git submodule foreach 'git clean -dfx' && git submodule update --recursive --init

Note: In previous builds, you may have created artifacts belonging to an another user (e.g root), so you may need to run each of the git clean commands as a sudoer.