Debian installation

This guide describes the fastest way to install Graylog on Debian Linux 9 (Stretch). All links and packages are present at the time of writing but might need to be updated later on.

Warning

This setup should not be done on publicly exposed servers. This guide does not cover security settings!

Prerequisites

If you’re starting from a minimal server setup, you will need to install these additional packages:

#!/etc/apt/source.list
deb http://httpredir.debian.org/debian jessie-backports main contrib non-free

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

apt-get install apt-transport-https uuid-runtime pwgen 

apt-get install -t jessie-backports openjdk-8-jre-headless ca-certificates-java

MongoDB

The version of MongoDB included in Debian Jessie is recent enough to be used with Graylog 2.3.x and higher:

apt-get install mongodb-server










Elasticsearch


Graylog 2.4.x should be used with Elasticsearch 5.x, please follow the installation instructions from the Elasticsearch installation guide:






 
 
 
wget -qO - https://artifacts.elastic.co/GPG-KEY-elasticsearch | apt-key add - 
echo "deb https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/5.x/apt stable main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/elastic-5.x.list 
apt-get update && apt-get install elasticsearch
 








Make sure to modify the Elasticsearch configuration file (/etc/elasticsearch/elasticsearch.yml) and set the cluster name to graylog additionally you need to uncomment (remove the # as first character) the line:






 
 
 
cluster.name: graylog
 








After you have modified the configuration, you can start Elasticsearch:






 
 
 
systemctl daemon-reload 
systemctl enable elasticsearch.service
systemctl restart elasticsearch.service
 












Graylog


Now install the Graylog repository configuration and Graylog itself with the following commands:






 
 
 
wget https://packages.graylog2.org/repo/packages/graylog-2.4-repository_latest.deb 
dpkg -i graylog-2.4-repository_latest.deb 
apt-get update && apt-get install graylog-server
 








Follow the instructions in your /etc/graylog/server/server.conf and add password_secret and root_password_sha2. These settings are mandatory and without them, Graylog will not start!


You need to use the following command to create your root_password_sha2:






 
 
 
echo -n yourpassword | sha256sum
 








To be able to connect to Graylog you should set rest_listen_uri and web_listen_uri to the public host name or a public IP address of the machine you can connect to. More information about these settings can be found in Configuring the web interface.




Note


If you’re operating a single-node setup and would like to use HTTPS for the Graylog web interface and the Graylog REST API, it’s possible to use NGINX or Apache as a reverse proxy.




The last step is to enable Graylog during the operating system’s startup:






 
 
 
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable graylog-server.service
systemctl start graylog-server.service
 






The next step is to ingest messages into your Graylog and extract the messages with extractors or use the Pipelines to work with the messages.






Multiple Server Setup


If you plan to have multiple server taking care of different roles in your cluster like we have in this big production setup you need to modify only a few settings. This is covered in our Multi-node Setup guide. The default file location guide will give you the file you need to modify in your setup.






Feedback


Please file a bug report in the GitHub repository for the operating system packages if you run into any packaging related issues.


If you found this documentation confusing or have more questions, please open an issue in the Github repository for the documentation.