Install

Overview

SnowFox aims to be a fully featured, distributed, service manager. There are (at least) two compilactions with this:

• What is fully featured? You will need different features to me and always adding new ones may not be an option.
• If all features are implemented from scratch inside SnowFox itself the codebase would become so complex that it would be impossible to maintain and evolve (and it would take so much time).

So SnowFox has a different approach to most features: if there is an open source solution that already implements what we need, integrate with it instead of rebuilding it.

As a result installing SnowFox is not just about SnowFox. Some systems (like a KeyValue storage for Metadata) are required to run SnowFox while others (like a DNS server for services) are required only for some features and SnowFox will be able to start and function without them.

Steps

These are the steps required to install and run a SnowFox cluster:

1. Install a metadata store (TODO).
2. Install SnowFox following the instructions below.
3. Create a configuration repository (clone and customise the default one: https://github.com/ArcticNature/default-config )
4. Start SnowFox.

Install from source

At this time, the only install method is through direct source code compilation.

SnowFox uses several tools and languages which means there are a few pre-requisites to compiling the sources.

But fear not! The custom-built build tool for SnowFox makes it easy to compile the entire project with little effort.

This guide will go through the installation and compilation steps on Fedora 23. Be aware that this is for gidance only and that your mileage may vary.

Installing compile-time dependencies

Install the compilers and build tools used by SnowFox’s build system:

sudo dnf install cmake gcc-c++ git make openssl-devel protobuf-compiler protobuf-devel

Install the latest version of Node.js, NPM, and Grunt:

curl --silent --location https://rpm.nodesource.com/setup_5.x | sudo bash -
sudo dnf install nodejs
sudo npm install grunt-cli

Compiling the code

Pull SnowFox’s source code and compile it:

mkdir -p /tmp/snow-fox-source
cd /tmp/snow-fox-source

git clone https://github.com/ArcticNature/snow-fox.git --recursive
cd snow-fox

npm install
grunt distribute

Installing the result

The output of a distribution build is stored in out/packages. For convenience, let us put the compiled distribution in /opt:

sudo mkdir -p /opt
sudo cp --recursive --preserve=all out/packages/snow-fox /opt/
sudo useradd --home-dir /opt/snow-fox --shell /bin/false --system --user-group snow-fox
sudo chown -R snow-fox:snow-fox /opt/snow-fox