2. Installation

Elephant Shed consists of the following Debian packages and their dependencies:

  • elephant-shed: Metapackage that includes the following packages.
  • elephant-shed-prometheus: Configuration files and helper scripts for Prometheus and its exporters.
  • elephant-shed-cockpit: Configuration files for cockpit and cockpit-ws.
  • elephant-shed-grafana: Preconfigured Prometheus datasource and dashboard that includes various system and PostgreSQL metrics.
  • elephant-shed-omnidb: Configuration files for OmniDB.
  • elephant-shed-pgbackrest: Systemd service files and generators, helper scripts and preset configuration.
  • elephant-shed-pgbadger: Systemd service files, generators and helper scripts.
  • elephant-shed-portal: Elephant Shed web portal including Apache configuration.
  • elephant-shed-postgresql: Additional preset configuration files for PostgreSQL.
  • elephant-shed-shellinabox: Shell In A Box configuration files.
  • elephant-shed-tmate: Preconfigured tmate installation for easier support.

2.1. Package Installation

Prebuilt packages are available from https://packages.credativ.com/public/postgresql/.

The repository also contains packages that the elephant-shed packages depend on. This includes packages for Grafana, Cockpit and various python libraries.

2.1.1. Installation on Debian and Ubuntu

# Install tools
sudo apt-get install curl ca-certificates apt-transport-https

# Use official PostgreSQL repo, apt.postgresql.org
echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ buster-pgdg main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list
curl https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -

# Use credativ repo, packages.credativ.com
echo "deb https://packages.credativ.com/public/postgresql/ buster-stable main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elephant-shed.list
curl https://packages.credativ.com/public/postgresql/aptly.key | sudo apt-key add -

# Install elephant-shed
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install elephant-shed

# In case of dependency issues regarding omnidb on buster, add backports
echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -t buster-backports python3-django
sudo apt-get install elephant-shed

# Choose desired PostgreSQL versions to install
sudo apt-get install postgresql-10

# Every user in the group "elephant-shed" is allowed to login at the portal
# Add all needed users to this group
sudo adduser <USERNAME> elephant-shed

2.1.2. Installation on RedHat and CentOS

Elephant Shed works with the PostgreSQL packages from the PostgreSQL RPM building project. Go to yum.postgresql.org and install the repository RPMs for the PostgreSQL versions you want to use. Then proceed to install Elephant Shed as below.

# Use credativ repository (will also pull in EPEL)
sudo yum install https://packages.credativ.com/public/postgresql/yum/credativ-repo.rpm

# On RedHat, activate additional repositories (not on CentOS)
subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-7-server-extras-rpms
subscription-manager repos --enable=rhel-7-server-optional-rpms

# Choose desired PostgreSQL versions to install
sudo yum install postgresql13-server postgresql13-contrib postgresql-common
sudo pg_createcluster 13 main --start

# Install elephant-shed
sudo yum install elephant-shed

# Every user in the group "elephant-shed" is allowed to login at the portal
# Add all needed users to this group
sudo vigr

# Unfortunately, shellinabox does not work with SELinux enabled
# Disable SELinux if you want to use this component
sudo setenforce 0
sudo sed -i -e 's/^SELINUX=.*/SELINUX=permissive/' /etc/selinux/config

2.2. Installation from source

The source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/credativ/elephant-shed

2.2.1. Build Debian Packages

All Elephant Shed Debian packages can be built using the command make deb.

Requirements:

  • dpkg-dev
  • devscripts

2.2.2. Build Documentation

To build the documentation in HTML format type make docs.

Requirements:

  • sphinx

2.2.3. Create Testsystem with Vagrant

The make vagrant command builds all components, creates a new virtual machine using Vagrant and deploys the software using Ansible. This can also be used to redeploy a already running machine.

The Vagrant configuration is located in vagrant/Vagrantfile.

Requirements:

  • vagrant
  • virtualbox or libvirt
  • ansible

2.2.4. Deploy on remote machine

To deploy the software on any machine, enter the connection information in the inventory vagrant/inventory. The deployment can than be started with the following command make ansible.

Requirements:

  • ansible