Ubuntu installation

This guide describes the fastest way to install Graylog on Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04 LTS. All links and packages are present at the time of writing but might need to be updated later on.

Prerequisites

Taking a minimal server setup as a base will need these additional packages:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https openjdk-<version_number>-jre-headless uuid-runtime pwgen

If you get an error stating Unable to locate the package, you likely need to enable the universe repository, which can be done by typing the below command and subsequent commands as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https openjdk-<version_number>-jre-headless uuid-runtime pwgen

MongoDB

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

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv 9DA31620334BD75D9DCB49F368818C72E52529D4
echo "deb [ arch=amd64 ] https://repo.mongodb.org/apt/ubuntu bionic/mongodb-org/4.0 multiverse" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb-org-4.0.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y mongodb-org

For example, in corporate proxies and other non-free environments, you can use a keyserver approach via a widget. 

wget -qO- 'http://keyserver.ubuntu.com/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x9DA31620334BD75D9DCB49F368818C72E52529D4' | sudo apt-key add -

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

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; follow the below instructions to install the open-source version of Elasticsearch.

wget -q https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch -O myKey
sudo apt-key add myKey
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-get update && sudo apt-get install elasticsearch-oss

The above instructions are a derivative from the Elasticsearch install page.

Modify the Elasticsearch configuration file (/etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml), 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 --type=service --state=active | grep elasticsearch

Graylog

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

wget https://packages.graylog2.org/repo/packages/graylog-4.3-repository_latest.deb
sudo dpkg -i graylog-4.3-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 hostname or a public IP address of the machine to which you can connect. 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 servers taking care of different roles in your cluster as 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.