Helix Swarm Guide (2019.1)

Install and configure Swarm manually from a Tarball

Important
  1. Download the Swarm tarball.

  2. Expand the Swarm package (a compressed tarball).

    From the command line, expand it via the tar command:

    $ tar -zxf swarm.tgz

    The contents of the Swarm package are expanded into a top-level folder named swarm-version, where version corresponds to the version downloaded.

    Tip

    Many graphical file manager applications (Nautilus on Linux, Finder on Mac, etc.) can automatically expand the tarball package by simply double-clicking it.

  3. Move the contents of the Swarm package to the correct location.

    Identify a location for the Swarm files; this should correspond to a location associated to the virtual host configured under Apache (see Apache configuration).

    $ mv /path/to/swarm-version /path/to/vhosts/swarm
  4. Assign correct ownership and permission for the Swarm files.

    The data top-level folder in the Swarm distribution needs to be writeable by the web server. To achieve this effect, simply change ownership of the data folder to the web user:

    $ sudo chown -R www /path/to/vhosts/swarm/data

    The www user above is an example of what the web server user name might be. Depending on your distribution, this could be _www, web, nobody or something else entirely.

    If your web server is already running, you can discover the user with:

    $ ps aux | grep -E 'apache|httpd'
    root      3592  0.0  0.5 405240 20708 ?        Ss   May03   4:32 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start
    www      20016  0.0  0.2 405264  9796 ?        S    07:45   0:00 /usr/sbin/apache2 -k start

    In this example, www is the user Apache is running as.

    From a security perspective, we recommend that the minimum file permissions should be granted to the user/group under which the web server runs against the Swarm distribution.

  5. Configure Apache, see Apache configuration.