Debian installation

This guide describes the fastest way to install Graylog on Debian Linux 10 (Buster). All links and packages are present at the time of writing but might need to be updated later on.

Prerequisites

If you’re starting from a minimal server setup, you will need to install these additional packages:

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
$ sudo apt install apt-transport-https openjdk-11-jre-headless uuid-runtime pwgen dirmngr gnupg wget

MongoDB

The official MongoDB repository provides the most up-to-date version and is the recommended way of installing MongoDB:

wget -qO - https://www.mongodb.org/static/pgp/server-4.2.asc | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb http://repo.mongodb.org/apt/debian buster/mongodb-org/4.2 main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb-org-4.2.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y mongodb-org

The next step is to enable MongoDB during the operating system’s startup:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable mongod.service
$ sudo systemctl restart mongod.service
$ sudo systemctl --type=service --state=active | grep mongod

Elasticsearch

Graylog can be used with Elasticsearch 7.x, please follow the below instructions to install the open source version of Elasticsearch.

$ wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | sudo apt-key add -
$ echo "deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/oss-7.x/apt stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-7.x.list
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install elasticsearch-oss

The above instructions are a derivative from the Elasticsearch install page

Modify the Elasticsearch configuration file (/etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml) and set the cluster name to graylog and uncomment action.auto_create_index: false to enable the action:

$ sudo tee -a /etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml > /dev/null << EOT
cluster.name: graylog
action.auto_create_index: false
EOT

After you have modified the configuration, you can start Elasticsearch and verify it is running.

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable elasticsearch.service
$ sudo systemctl restart elasticsearch.service
$ sudo systemctl restart elasticsearch.service

Graylog

Now install the Graylog repository configuration and Graylog itself with the following commands:

wget https://packages.graylog2.org/repo/packages/graylog-4.2-repository_latest.deb
sudo dpkg -i graylog-4.2-repository_latest.deb
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install graylog-server graylog-enterprise-plugins graylog-integrations-plugins graylog-enterprise-integrations-plugins

Edit the Configuration File

Read the instructions within the configurations file and edit as needed, located at /etc/graylog/server/server.conf. Additionally, add password_secret and root_password_sha2 as these are mandatory and Graylog will not start without them.

To create your root_password_sha2 run the following command:

echo -n "Enter Password: " && head -1 </dev/stdin | tr -d '\n' | sha256sum | cut -d" " -f1

To be able to connect to Graylog you should set http_bind_address to the public host name or a public IP address of the machine you can connect to. More information about these settings can be found in Configuring the web interface.

The last step is to enable Graylog during the operating system’s startup and verify it is running.

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload
$ sudo systemctl enable graylog-server.service
$ sudo systemctl start graylog-server.service
$ sudo systemctl --type=service --state=active | grep graylog

The next step is to ingest messages into your Graylog and extract the messages with extractors or use the Pipelines to work with the messages.

Multiple Server Setup

If you plan to have multiple server taking care of different roles in your cluster like we have in this big production setup you need to modify only a few settings. This is covered in our Multi-node Setup guide. The default file location guide will give you the file you need to modify in your setup.