Operating System Packages

Until configuration management systems made their way into broader markets and many datacenters, one of the most common ways to install software on Linux servers was to use operating system packages. Debian has DEB, Red Hat has RPM and many other distributions are based on those or come with their own package formats. Online repositories of software packages and corresponding package managers make installing and configuring new software a matter of a single command and a few minutes of time.

Graylog offers official DEB and RPM package repositories. The packages have been tested on the following operating systems:

• Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04
• Debian 10, 11
• RHEL/CentOS 6, 7, 8

The repositories can be set up by installing a single package. Once that’s done, the Graylog packages can be installed via apt-get or yum. The packages can also be downloaded with a web browser at https://packages.graylog2.org/ if needed.

Prerequisites

Make sure to install and configure the following software before installing and starting any Graylog services:

• Java ( >= 8 )
• Elasticsearch (6.x or 7.x)
• MongoDB (4.0, 4.2 or 4.4)

Step by Step Guides

• Ubuntu
• Debian
• RHEL/CentOS
• SLES

DEB / APT

Download and install graylog-4.3-repository_latest.deb via dpkg(1) and also make sure that the apt-transport-https package is installed:

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https
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

After the installation completed successfully, Graylog can be started with the following commands. Make sure to use the correct command for your operating system.

The packages are configured to not start any Graylog services during boot. You can use the following commands to start Graylog when the operating system is booting.

Update to latest version

If you’ve been using the repository package to install Graylog before, it has to be updated first. The new package will replace the repository URL, without which you will only be able to get bugfix releases of your previously installed version of Graylog.

The update basically works like a fresh installation:

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

Manual Repository Installation

If you don’t like to install the repository DEB to get the repository configuration onto your system, you can do so manually (although we don’t recommend doing that).

First, add the Graylog GPG keyring which is being used to sign the packages to your system.

Now create a file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/graylog.listwith the following content:

deb https://packages.graylog2.org/repo/debian/ stable 4.3 

RPM / YUM / DNF

Download and install graylog-4.3-repository_latest.rpm via rpm(8):

sudo rpm -Uvh https://packages.graylog2.org/repo/packages/graylog-4.3-repository_latest.rpm
sudo yum install graylog-server

After the installation completed successfully, Graylog can be started with the following commands. Make sure to use the correct command for your operating system.

The packages are configured to not start any Graylog services during boot. You can use the following commands to start Graylog when the operating system is booting.

Update to latest version

If you’ve been using the repository package to install Graylog before, it has to be updated first. The new package will replace the repository URL, without which you will only be able to get bugfix releases of your previously installed version of Graylog.

The update basically works like a fresh installation:

sudo rpm -Uvh https://packages.graylog2.org/repo/packages/graylog-4.3-repository_latest.rpm
sudo yum clean all
sudo yum install graylog-server

Running yum clean all is required because YUM might use a stale cache and thus might be unable to find the latest version of the graylog-server package.

Manual Repository Installation

If you don’t prefer to install the repository RPM to get the repository configuration onto your system, you can do so manually (although we don’t recommend to do that).

First, add the Graylog GPG key which is being used to sign the packages to your system.

Now create a file named /etc/yum.repos.d/graylog.repo with the following content:

[graylog]
name=graylog
baseurl=https://packages.graylog2.org/repo/el/stable/4.3/$basearch/
gpgcheck=1
repo_gpgcheck=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-graylog

Step-by-step guides

• Ubuntu
• Debian
• RHEL/CentOS
• SLES

Feedback

Please file a bug report in the GitHub repository for the operating system packages if you run into any packaging related issues.
If you found this documentation confusing or have more questions, please open an issue in the Github repository for the documentation.