Installation and Configuration

Installing Docker

Before installing Titan, you must have docker configured on your system and permission to run privileged Linux containers. For MacOS and Windows, this means installing Docker Desktop. For Linux, this means installing docker via your distribution-specific mechanism.

If you can run a basic Linux docker container you’re ready for the next step:

$ docker run --rm busybox:latest echo ready
ready

Downloading Titan

To download Titan, head over to the Download Page and download the archive specific to your platform. Extract the archive and place it in a location that is part of your PATH such as ~/bin or /usr/local/bin.

If you can get the current Titan version you’re ready for the next step:

$ titan --version
titan version 0.5.2

Installing Titan

While Titan is delivered as a standalone executable, it relies on a containerized service to do a lot of the heavy lifting. The titan install command will download and run these containers. It may take some time to download the titan image, but once complete you should be able to see two containers running named titan-docker-launch and titan-docker-server:

Note

For MacOS users: By default, MacOS will block unverified binaries (which this is). You may receive an error similar to “‘titan’ cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified.”

To resolve this, click “cancel,” then navigate to “System Preferences”-> “Security and Privacy”>”General” where you will see something like: “‘Titan’ was blocked from use because it’s not from an identified developer.”

Click “Open Anyway,” return to the terminal and re-run titan install

$ titan install
Initializing titan infrastructure ...
    √ Checking docker installation
    √ Starting titan server docker containers
Titan cli successfully installed, happy data versioning :)
$ docker ps
CONTAINER ID        IMAGE               COMMAND                  CREATED             STATUS              PORTS                    NAMES
ff80dcdf8d0e        titan:latest        "/titan/run"             9 seconds ago       Up 7 seconds        0.0.0.0:5001->5001/tcp   titan-docker-server
6b09cccc407a        titan:latest        "/bin/bash /titan/la…"   29 seconds ago      Up 14 seconds                                titan-docker-launch

By deafult, this installs a local docker context, and is equivalent to titan context install -t docker. If you want to install Titan for use with Kubernetes, see the Managing Titan Contexts and Titan with Kubernetes sections. If you are operating in a corporate environment without access to the main docker registry, you can manually load the `titandata/titan image into a private registry and use the -r registry option to titan install to pull from there instead.

When using the local docker context, the titan-<context>-launch container is responsible for installing ZFS on the Docker or host VM. For more information on how this works and supported configurations, see the Titan with Docker section.

If you can successfully run titan ls, then you should be all set:

$ titan ls
CONTEXT             REPOSITORY             STATUS