tahoe-lafs/docs/INSTALL.rst

Getting Tahoe-LAFS

Welcome to the Tahoe-LAFS project, a secure, decentralized, fault-tolerant storage system. See about.rst for an overview of the architecture and security properties of the system.

How To Get Tahoe-LAFS

This procedure has been verified to work on Windows, Mac, OpenSolaris, and too many flavors of Linux and of BSD to list.

First: In Case Of Trouble

In some cases these instructions may fail due to peculiarities of your platform.

If the following instructions don't Just Work without any further effort on your part, then please write to the tahoe-dev mailing list where friendly hackers will help you out.

Pre-Packaged Versions

You may not need to build Tahoe at all.

If you are on Windows, please see ./windows.rst for platform-specific instructions.

If you are on a Mac, you can either follow these instructions, or use the pre-packaged bundle described in OS-X.rst. The Tahoe project hosts pre-compiled "wheels" for all dependencies, so use the --find-links= option described below to avoid needing a compiler.

Many Linux distributions include Tahoe-LAFS packages. Debian and Ubuntu users can apt-get install tahoe-lafs. See OSPackages.rst for other platforms.

Preliminaries

If you don't use a pre-packaged copy of Tahoe, you can build it yourself. You'll need Python2.7, pip, and virtualenv. On unix-like platforms, you will need a C compiler, the Python development headers, and some libraries (libffi-dev and libssl-dev).

On Debian/Ubuntu-derived distributions, this command will get you everything you need:

apt-get install build-essential python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev python-virtualenv

On OS-X, install pip and virtualenv as described below. If you want to compile the dependencies yourself (instead of using --find-links to take advantage of the pre-compiled ones we host), you'll also need to install Xcode and its command-line tools.

• python 2.7

Check if you already have an adequate version of Python installed by running python -V. The latest version of Python v2.7 is required, which is 2.7.10 as of this writing. Python v2.6.x and v3 do not work. On Windows, we recommend the use of native Python v2.7, not Cygwin Python. If you don't have one of these versions of Python installed, download and install the latest version of Python v2.7. Make sure that the path to the installation directory has no spaces in it (e.g. on Windows, do not install Python in the "Program Files" directory):

% python --version
Python 2.7.11

• pip

Many Python installations already include pip, but in case yours does not, follow the instructions at https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/ :

% pip --version
pip 8.1.1 from ... (python 2.7)

• virtualenv

Install virtualenv with the instructions at https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/installation.html :

% virtualenv --version
15.0.1

• C compiler and libraries

Except on OS-X, where the Tahoe project hosts pre-compiled wheels for all dependencies, you will need several C libraries installed before you can build. You will also need the Python development headers, and a C compiler (your python installation should know how to find these).

On Debian/Ubuntu-derived systems, use:

apt-get install build-essential python-dev libffi-dev libssl-dev python-virtualenv

RPM-based systems will use something similar, but with yum or rpm instead of apt-get, and python-devel instead of python-dev.

Install the Latest Tahoe-LAFS Release ------------------------------------

We recommend creating a fresh virtualenv for your Tahoe-LAFS install, to isolate it from any python packages that are already installed (and to isolate the rest of your system from Tahoe's dependencies).

Activate the virtualenv, then install the latest Tahoe-LAFS release from PyPI with pip install tahoe-lafs. After installation, run tahoe --version to confirm the install was successful:

% virtualenv tahoe
New python executable in ~/tahoe/bin/python2.7
Installing setuptools, pip, wheel...done.
% . tahoe/bin/activate
(tahoe) % pip install tahoe-lafs
Collecting tahoe-lafs
...
Installing collected packages: ...
Successfully installed ...
(tahoe) % tahoe --version
tahoe-lafs: 1.11.0
foolscap: ...
(tahoe) %

On OS-X, instead of pip install tahoe-lafs, use this command to take advantage of the hosted pre-compiled wheels:

pip install --find-links=https://tahoe-lafs.org/deps tahoe-lafs

Install From a Source Tarball

You can also download the source tarball first, unpack it, then install from the unpacked source tree.

Download the latest stable release, Tahoe-LAFS v1.11.0.

Then unpack and install (again into a virtualenv):

% wget https://tahoe-lafs.org/source/tahoe-lafs/releases/tahoe-lafs-1.11.0.tar.bz2
...
% tar xf tahoe-lafs-1.11.0.tar.bz2
...
% cd tahoe-lafs-1.11.0
% virtualenv tahoe
New python executable in ~/tahoe-lafs-1.11.0/tahoe/bin/python2.7
Installing setuptools, pip, wheel...done.
% . tahoe/bin/activate
(tahoe) % pip install .
Processing ~/tahoe-lafs-1.11.0
...
Installing collected packages: ...
Successfully installed ...
(tahoe) % tahoe --version
tahoe-lafs: 1.11.0
...
(tahoe) %

Hacking On Tahoe-LAFS

To modify the Tahoe source code, you should get a git checkout, and install with the --editable flag:

% git clone https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs.git
...
% cd tahoe-lafs
% virtualenv tahoe
New python executable in ~/tahoe-lafs/tahoe/bin/python2.7
Installing setuptools, pip, wheel...done.
% . tahoe/bin/activate
(tahoe) % pip install --editable .
Processing ~/tahoe-lafs-1.11.0
...
Installing collected packages: ...
Successfully installed ...
(tahoe) % tahoe --version
tahoe-lafs: 1.11.0
...
(tahoe) %

This way, you won't have to re-run the pip install step each time you modify the source code.

Running Tahoe-LAFS

The rest of the Tahoe-LAFS documentation assumes that you can run the tahoe executable that you just created. To do this from other shells, you will either need to activate the virtualenv first (as above), or you can use the full path to the tahoe executable. If you created the virtualenv in ~/tahoe, then the executable will live in ~/tahoe/bin/tahoe:

# new shell, not in a virtualenv
% ~/tahoe/bin/tahoe --version
tahoe-lafs: 1.11.0
...

You can symlink this to your ~/bin directory for convenience. You might also like the pipsi tool: by running pipsi install tahoe-lafs, you will end up with a ~/.local/bin/tahoe that is symlinked to a new virtualenv.

Running the Self-Tests

To run the self-tests from a source tree, you'll need tox installed. On a Debian/Ubuntu system, use apt-get install tox. You can also install it into your tahoe virtualenv with pip install tox.

Then just run tox. This will create a new fresh virtualenv, install Tahoe (from the source tree, including any changes you have made) and all its dependencies into the virtualenv, then run the unit tests. This ensures that the tests are repeatable and match the results of other users, unaffected by anything else installed on your machine. On a modern computer this will take 5-10 minutes, and should result in a "all tests passed" mesage:

% tox
GLOB sdist-make: ~/tahoe/setup.py
py27 recreate: ~/tahoe/.tox/py27
py27 inst: ~/tahoe/.tox/dist/tahoe-lafs-1.11.0a2.post8.dev0.zip
py27 runtests: commands[0] | tahoe --version
py27 runtests: commands[1] | trial --rterrors allmydata
allmydata.test.test_auth
  AccountFileCheckerKeyTests
    test_authenticated ...                                           [OK]
    test_missing_signature ...                                       [OK]
 ...
Ran 1186 tests in 423.179s

PASSED (skips=7, expectedFailures=3, successes=1176)
__________________________ summary ___________________________________
  py27: commands succeeded
  congratulations :) 

Common Problems

If you see an error like fatal error: Python.h: No such file or directory while compiling the dependencies, you need the Python development headers. If you are on a Debian or Ubuntu system, you can install them with sudo apt-get install python-dev. On RedHat/Fedora, install python-devel.

Similar errors about openssl/crypto.h indicate that you are missing the OpenSSL development headers (libssl-dev). Likewise ffi.h means you need libffi-dev.

Run Tahoe-LAFS

Now you are ready to deploy a decentralized filesystem. The tahoe executable can configure and launch your Tahoe-LAFS nodes. See running.rst for instructions on how to do that.