Installing Graphite

Dependencies

Graphite renders graphs using the Cairo graphics library. This adds dependencies on several graphics-related libraries not typically found on a server. If you’re installing from source you can use the check-dependencies.py script to see if the dependencies have been met or not.

Basic Graphite requirements:

• Python 2.4 or greater (2.6+ recommended)
• Pycairo
• Django 1.0 or greater
• django-tagging 0.3.1 or greater
• Twisted 8.0 or greater (10.0+ recommended)
• zope-interface (often included in Twisted package dependency)
• fontconfig and at least one font package (a system package usually)
• A WSGI server and web server. Popular choices are: - Apache with mod_wsgi and mod_python - gunicorn with nginx - uWSGI with nginx

Python 2.4 and 2.5 have extra requirements:

• simplejson
• python-sqlite2 or another Django-supported database module

Additionally, the Graphite webapp and Carbon require the whisper database library which is part of the Graphite project.

There are also several other dependencies required for additional features:

• Render caching: memcached and python-memcache
• LDAP authentication: python-ldap (for LDAP authentication support in the webapp)
• AMQP support: txamqp
• RRD support: python-rrdtool

See also

On some systems it is necessary to install fonts for Cairo to use. If the webapp is running but all graphs return as broken images, this may be why.

• https://answers.launchpad.net/graphite/+question/38833
• https://answers.launchpad.net/graphite/+question/133390
• https://answers.launchpad.net/graphite/+question/127623

Fulfilling Dependencies

Most current Linux distributions have all of the requirements available in the base packages. RHEL based distributions may require the EPEL repository for requirements. Python module dependencies can be install with pip rather than system packages if desired or if using a Python version that differs from the system default. Some modules (such as Cairo) may require library development headers to be available.

Installing From Source

You can download the latest source tarballs for Graphite-web, Carbon, and Whisper from the Graphite project page, https://launchpad.net/graphite or clone the latest version using Bazaar: bzr branch lp:graphite

To install, simply extract the source and run python setup.py install as root in the project directories for Whisper, Carbon, and Graphite-web (the root of the repository in the case of a source tree checkout).

This will install Whisper as a site-package, while Carbon and Graphite will be installed in /opt/graphite/.

Help! It didn’t work!

If you run into any issues with Graphite, feel free to post a question to our Questions forum on Launchpad or join us on IRC in #graphite on FreeNode

Post-Install Tasks

Configuring Carbon

Once you’ve installed everything you will need to create some basic configuration. Initially none of the config files are created by the installer but example files are provided. Simply copy the .example files and customize.

Administering Carbon

Once Carbon is configured, you need to start it up.

Feeding In Your Data

Once it’s up and running, you need to feed it some data.

Configuring The Webapp

With data getting into carbon, you probably want to look at graphs of it. So now we turn our attention to the webapp.

Administering The Webapp

Once its configured you’ll need to get it running.

Using the Composer

Now that the webapp is running, you probably want to learn how to use it.