System Prerequisites

The following software packages are required to be installed on your system:

Additionally, in order to send out emails to users, Girder will need to be able to communicate with an SMTP server. Proper installation and configuration of an SMTP server on your system is beyond the scope of these docs, but we recommend setting up Postfix.

See the specific instructions for your platform below.

Note

We perform continuous integration testing using Python 2.7 and Python 3.4. The system should work on other versions of Python 3 as well, but we do not verify that support in our automated testing at this time, so use at your own risk.

Warning

Some Girder plugins do not support Python 3 at this time due to third party library dependencies. Namely, the HDFS Assetstore plugin and the Metadata Extractor plugin will only be available in a Python 2.7 environment.

Debian / Ubuntu

Install the prerequisites using APT:

sudo apt-get install curl g++ git libffi-dev make python-dev python-pip libssl-dev libjpeg-dev zlib1g-dev

MongoDB 2.6 requires a special incantation to install at this time. Install the APT key with the following:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv 7F0CEB10

For Debian, create the following configuration file for the MongoDB APT repository:

echo 'deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/debian-sysvinit dist 10gen' \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list

For Ubuntu, instead create the following configuration file:

echo 'deb http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/ubuntu-upstart dist 10gen' \
    | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb.list

Reload the package database and install MongoDB server using APT:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mongodb-org-server

With Ubuntu 16.04, create a systemd init script at

/lib/systemd/system/mongod.service:

[Unit]
Description=High-performance, schema-free document-oriented database
After=network.target
Documentation=https://docs.mongodb.org/manual

[Service]
User=mongodb
Group=mongodb
ExecStart=/usr/bin/mongod --quiet --config /etc/mongod.conf

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

and start it with:

sudo service mongod start

Enable the Node.js APT repository:

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | sudo -E bash -

Install Node.js and NPM using APT:

sudo apt-get install nodejs

Note

It’s recommended to get the latest version of the npm package manager, and Girder currently requires at least version 3 of npm. To upgrade to the latest npm, run:

npm install -g npm

This may need to be run as root using sudo.

CentOS / Fedora / Red Hat Enterprise Linux

For CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, enable the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux YUM repository:

sudo yum install epel-release

Install the prerequisites using YUM:

sudo yum install curl gcc-c++ git libffi-devel make python-devel python-pip openssl-devel libjpeg-turbo-devel zlib-devel

Create a file /etc/yum.repos.d/mongodb.repo that contains the following configuration information for the MongoDB YUM repository:

[mongodb]
name=MongoDB Repository
baseurl=http://downloads-distro.mongodb.org/repo/redhat/os/x86_64/
gpgcheck=0
enabled=1

Install MongoDB server using YUM:

sudo yum install mongodb-org-server

Enable the Node.js YUM repository:

curl --silent --location https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_6.x | bash -

Install Node.js and NPM using YUM:

sudo yum install nodejs

Arch Linux

For Arch Linux it is important to note that Python 3 is default. This means that most commands will need a 2 appending to them, i.e. python2, pip2, ...

Install the prerequisites using the pacman tool:

sudo pacman -S python2 python2-pip mongodb nodejs

OS X

It is recommended to use Homebrew to install the required packages on OS X.

To install all the prerequisites at once just use:

brew install python mongodb node

Note

OS X ships with Python in /usr/bin, so you might need to change your PATH or explicitly run /usr/local/bin/python when invoking the server so that you use the version with the correct site packages installed.

Windows

Warning

Windows is not supported or tested. This information is provided for developers. Use at your own risk.

Download, install, and configure MongoDB server following the instructions on the MongoDB website, and download and run the Node.js Windows Installer from the Node.js website.

Download and install the Windows MSI Installer for the latest Python 2 release from the Python website, and then download and run the ez_setup.py bootstrap script to install Setuptools for Python. You may need to add python\scripts to your path for NPM to work as expected.

From a command prompt, install pip:

easy_install pip

If bcrypt fails to install using pip (e.g., with Windows 7 x64 and Python 2.7), you need to manually install it prior to installing girder. You can build the package from source or download a wheel file from https://bitbucket.org/alexandrul/py-bcrypt/downloads and install it with the following:

pip install wheel
pip install py_bcrypt.whl