On Linux

If you wish to install locally or already have a configured server, see the basic Installation Guide

The following is a recommended way to configure Linux and install Harper. These instructions should work reasonably well for any public cloud or on-premises Linux instance.

---

These instructions assume that the following has already been completed:

1. Linux is installed

2. Basic networking is configured

3. A non-root user account dedicated to Harper with sudo privileges exists

4. An additional volume for storing Harper files is attached to the Linux instance

5. Traffic to ports 9925 (Harper Operations API) 9926 (Harper Application Interface) and 9932 (Harper Clustering) is permitted

While you will need to access Harper through port 9925 for the administration through the operations API, and port 9932 for clustering, for higher level of security, you may want to consider keeping both of these ports restricted to a VPN or VPC, and only have the application interface (9926 by default) exposed to the public Internet.

For this example, we will use an AWS Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS m5.large EC2 Instance with an additional General Purpose SSD EBS volume and the default “ubuntu” user account.

---

(Optional) LVM Configuration

Logical Volume Manager (LVM) can be used to stripe multiple disks together to form a single logical volume. If striping disks together is not a requirement, skip these steps.

Find disk that already has a partition

used_disk=$(lsblk -P -I 259 | grep "nvme.n1.*part" | grep -o "nvme.n1")

Create array of free disks

declare -a free_disks
mapfile -t free_disks < <(lsblk -P -I 259 | grep "nvme.n1.*disk" | grep -o "nvme.n1" | grep -v "$used_disk")

Get quantity of free disks

free_disks_qty=${#free_disks[@]}

Construct pvcreate command

cmd_string=""
for i in "${free_disks[@]}"
do
cmd_string="$cmd_string /dev/$i"
done

Initialize disks for use by LVM

pvcreate_cmd="pvcreate $cmd_string"
sudo $pvcreate_cmd

Create volume group

vgcreate_cmd="vgcreate hdb_vg $cmd_string"
sudo $vgcreate_cmd

Create logical volume

sudo lvcreate -n hdb_lv -i $free_disks_qty -l 100%FREE hdb_vg

Configure Data Volume

Run lsblk and note the device name of the additional volume

lsblk

Create an ext4 filesystem on the volume (The below commands assume the device name is nvme1n1. If you used LVM to create logical volume, replace /dev/nvme1n1 with /dev/hdb_vg/hdb_lv)

sudo mkfs.ext4 -L hdb_data /dev/nvme1n1

Mount the file system and set the correct permissions for the directory

mkdir /home/ubuntu/hdb
sudo mount -t ext4 /dev/nvme1n1 /home/ubuntu/hdb
sudo chown -R ubuntu:ubuntu /home/ubuntu/hdb
sudo chmod 775 /home/ubuntu/hdb

Create a fstab entry to mount the filesystem on boot

echo "LABEL=hdb_data /home/ubuntu/hdb ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Configure Linux and Install Prerequisites

If a swap file or partition does not already exist, create and enable a 2GB swap file

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=128M count=16
sudo chmod 600 /swapfile
sudo mkswap /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile
echo "/swapfile swap swap defaults 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Increase the open file limits for the ubuntu user

echo "ubuntu soft nofile 500000" | sudo tee -a /etc/security/limits.conf
echo "ubuntu hard nofile 1000000" | sudo tee -a /etc/security/limits.conf

Install Node Version Manager (nvm)

curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.39.3/install.sh | bash

Load nvm (or logout and then login)

. ~/.nvm/nvm.sh

Install Node.js using nvm (read more about specific Node version requirements)

nvm install <the node version>

Install and Start Harper

Here is an example of installing Harper with minimal configuration.

npm install -g harperdb
harperdb start \
  --TC_AGREEMENT "yes" \
  --ROOTPATH "/home/ubuntu/hdb" \
  --OPERATIONSAPI_NETWORK_PORT "9925" \
  --HDB_ADMIN_USERNAME "HDB_ADMIN" \
  --HDB_ADMIN_PASSWORD "password"

Here is an example of installing Harper with commonly used additional configuration.

npm install -g harperdb
harperdb start \
  --TC_AGREEMENT "yes" \
  --ROOTPATH "/home/ubuntu/hdb" \
  --OPERATIONSAPI_NETWORK_PORT "9925" \
  --HDB_ADMIN_USERNAME "HDB_ADMIN" \
  --HDB_ADMIN_PASSWORD "password" \
  --HTTP_SECUREPORT "9926" \
  --CLUSTERING_ENABLED "true" \
  --CLUSTERING_USER "cluster_user" \
  --CLUSTERING_PASSWORD "password" \
  --CLUSTERING_NODENAME "hdb1"

You can also use a custom configuration file to set values on install, use the CLI/ENV variable HDB_CONFIG and set it to the path of your custom configuration file:

npm install -g harperdb
harperdb start \
  --TC_AGREEMENT "yes" \
  --HDB_ADMIN_USERNAME "HDB_ADMIN" \
  --HDB_ADMIN_PASSWORD "password" \
  --HDB_CONFIG "/path/to/your/custom/harperdb-config.yaml"

Start Harper on Boot

Harper will automatically start after installation. If you wish Harper to start when the OS boots, you have two options:

You can set up a crontab:

(crontab -l 2>/dev/null; echo "@reboot PATH=\"/home/ubuntu/.nvm/versions/node/v18.15.0/bin:$PATH\" && harperdb start") | crontab -

Or you can create a systemd script at /etc/systemd/system/harperdb.service

Pasting the following contents into the file:

[Unit]
Description=Harper

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=always
User=ubuntu
Group=ubuntu
WorkingDirectory=/home/ubuntu
ExecStart=/bin/bash -c 'PATH="/home/ubuntu/.nvm/versions/node/v18.15.0/bin:$PATH"; harperdb'

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

And then running the following:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable harperdb

For more information visit the Harper Command Line Interface guide and the Harper Configuration File guide.