Installation & First steps

This is just a prototype, do not yet use in production.

Installation & First steps

System requirements

NethServer 8 can be deployed on one ore more nodes in a cluster scenario.

Supported distributions and architectures:

Rocky Linux 9.0 (Blue Onyx) x86-64
CentOS Stream 9 x86-64
Debian 11 (bullseye) x86-64

Hardware requirements for a single node installation:

2 vCPU/cores
2GB RAM
20GB disk

More nodes can be added later. When adding a new node, you should use similar hardware and the same distribution installed on the leader node.

Always install NethServer 8 on a clean server machine, do not install it on a desktop.

Core installation

Pick your preferred distribution between supported ones and make sure it’s up to date. Also ensure that the system firewall is not blocking any connection.

First, ensure curl is installed:

for Debian: apt-get install -y curl
for CentOS: dnf install -y curl

Start the installation procedure as root:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/NethServer/ns8-core/main/core/install.sh | bash

At the end of the install script the UI is available at https://<server_ip_or_fqdn>/cluster-admin/:

default user: admin
default password: Nethesis,1234

Some configuration tasks can be completed also by invoking additional commands: follow on-screen instructions printed by install.sh.

Run either new cluster initialization (create-cluster) or joining an existing cluster (join-cluster).

Install custom images

Developers may prefer to run install.sh with one or more images from a development branch or alternative registries.

bash install.sh ghcr.io/nethserver/core:latest ghcr.io/nethserver/traefik:mybranch

Install customization

The install script also accepts the following environment variables:

TESTING: override testing flag inside the default repository. It can be 0 (disabled) or 1 (enabled), default is 0
REPMOD: override default software repository URL, it could be something like https://mycustomrrepo.server.test/repomd
ADMIN_PASSWORD: override default admin password

Applications

Core applications installed by default:

Traefik – see how to request a Let’s Encrypt certificate for the FQDN
Loki (only on the leader node)
Promtail
LDAP proxy

Other available core applications:

Samba

Application installation

Applications can be installed directly from the user interface.

If you prefer the command line, use the add-module command:

add-module <module> <node_id>

The above command will try to install the latest stable version of the module.

Example to install Dokuwiki on node 1:

add-module dokuwiki 1

You can also install an image which is not still available inside the repository by using its URL.

Example to install Dokuwiki directly from the image registry:

add-module ghcr.io/nethserver/dokuwiki:mydev 1

If the given image is already present in the local Podman storage, no remote download occurs and the local image is used instead. During development this might be unwanted and to work around this behavior execute the following command in every cluster node, before add-module:

podman rmi ghcr.io/nethserver/dokuwiki:mydev

Many applications need a configuration step after install, for more info, please refer to the README of each application.

Partial list of available applications:

Uninstall

The uninstall.sh script attempts to stop and erase core components and additional modules. Handle it with care because it erases everything under /home/* and /var/lib/nethserver/*!

bash /var/lib/nethserver/node/uninstall.sh