icinga2/INSTALL

Installing Icinga 2
===================

Please note that the current version of Icinga 2 isn't much more than a tech
demo. Expect some rough edges when installing and running Icinga 2.

For the "finished" version we're planning to release packages for the most
common Linux distributions as well as for Windows - or at least co-operate
with the package maintainers.

Build Requirements
------------------

The following requirements need to be fulfilled in order to build the
application using a dist tarball (package names for RHEL and Debian in
parentheses):

* GNU make (make)
* C++ compiler (gcc-c++ on RHEL, build-essential on Debian)
* OpenSSL library and header files (openssl-devel on RHEL, libssl-dev
                                    on Debian)
* Boost library and header files (boost-devel on RHEL, libboost-all-dev
                                  on Debian)
* optional: Doxygen (doxygen)
* optional: MySQL (mysql-devel on RHEL, libmysqlclient-dev on Debian)
* optional: Python (python-devel on RHEL, python-dev on Debian)

Packaging Requirements
----------------------

In order to build a dist tarball for the application the following external
software components need to be installed in addition to the build requirements
mentioned above:

* GNU Automake (automake)
* GNU Autoconf (autoconf)
* GNU Libtool (libtool and libtool-ltdl-devel on RHEL, libtool and
               libltdl-dev on Debian)
* GNU bison (bison)
* GNU flex (flex)

In order to build the dist tarball (using "make dist") you need sufficiently
recent versions of the packages listed above.

User Requirements
-----------------

By default Icinga will run as user 'icinga' and group 'icinga'. Additionally the
external command pipe and livestatus features require a dedicated command group
'icingacmd'. You can choose your own user/group names and pass them to the
configure script using the --with-icinga-user, --with-icinga-group,
--with-icingacmd-user and --with-icingacmd-group options.

# groupadd icinga
# groupadd icingacmd
# useradd -c "icinga" -s /sbin/nologin -G icingacmd -g icinga

Add the web server user to the icingacmd group in order to grant it write
permissions to the external command pipe and livestatus socket:

# usermod -a -G icingacmd www-data

Make sure to replace "www-data" with the name of the user your web server
is running as.

Building Icinga 2
-----------------

Once you have installed all the necessary build requirements you can build
Icinga 2 using the following commands:

$ ./configure
$ make
$ make install

The configure script supports all the usual parameters one comes to expect
from autoconf. In particular you may want to use --prefix to specify an
alternative installation prefix.

Note: The Git repository does not contain any auto-generated Autotools files,
i.e. there is no 'configure' script. In this case you will need to regenerate
the 'configure' script by running 'autogen.sh'. However, as an end-user you
should reconsider whether you really want to use the code from the Git
repository. In general it is advisable to use one of the dist tarballs instead.

Running Icinga 2
----------------

Icinga 2 comes with a single binary that takes care of loading all the relevant
components (e.g. for check execution, notifications, etc.):

$ icinga2
[2012/09/14 10:36:12] information/icinga: Icinga application loader (version:
                      2.0, git branch master, commit 8e4bdf38 + changes)
[2012/09/14 10:36:12] information/base: Syntax: icinga2 -c <config-file> ...

Icinga 2 reads a single configuration file which is used to specify all
configuration settings (global settings, hosts, services, etc.). The
configuration format is explained in detail in the docs/icinga2-config.txt
file.

By default "make install" installs example configuration files in
/usr/local/etc/icinga2 unless you have specified a different prefix or
sysconfdir.