Install Netdata with kickstart.sh

This page covers detailed instructions on using and configuring the automatic one-line installation script named kickstart.sh.

This method is fully automatic on all Linux distributions and macOS environments. To install Netdata from source, including all dependencies required to connect to Netdata Cloud, and get automatic nightly updates, run the following as your normal user:

Linux

bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh)

macOS

bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh) --install /usr/local/

See our installation guide for details about automatic updates or nightly vs. stable releases.

What does kickstart.sh do?

The kickstart.sh script does the following after being downloaded and run using bash:

• Detects the Linux distribution and installs the required system packages for building Netdata. Unless you added the --dont-wait option, it will ask for your permission first.
• Checks for an existing installation, and if found updates that instead of creating a new install.
• Downloads the latest Netdata source tree to /usr/src/netdata.git.
• Installs Netdata by running ./netdata-installer.sh from the source tree, using any optional parameters you have specified.
• Installs netdata-updater.sh to cron.daily, so your Netdata installation will be updated with new nightly versions, unless you override that with an optional parameter.
• Prints a message whether installation succeeded or failed for QA purposes.

Optional parameters to alter your installation

The kickstart.sh script passes all its parameters to netdata-installer.sh, which you can use to customize your installation. Here are a few important parameters:

• --dont-wait: Synonym for --non-interactive
• --non-interactive: Don’t prompt for anything and assume yes whenever possible.
• --no-updates: Disable automatic updates.
• --stable-channel: Use a stable build instead of a nightly build.
• --reinstall: If an existing install is found, reinstall instead of trying to update it in place.
• --dont-start-it: Don’t auto-start the daemon after installing. This parameter is not gauranteed to work.
• --install: Specify an alternative install prefix.
• --disable-cloud: For local builds, don’t build any of the cloud code at all. For native packages and static builds, use runtime configuration to disable cloud support.
• --auto-update-type: Specify how auto-updates are to be scheduled, overriding auto-detection.
• --disable-telemetry: Disable anonymous statistics.
• --local-files: Used for offline installations. Pass four file paths: the Netdata tarball, the checksum file, the go.d plugin tarball, and the go.d plugin config tarball, to force kickstart run the process using those files. This option conflicts with the --stable-channel option. If you set this and--stable-channel, Netdata will use the local files.
• all: Ask for all dependencies in the dependency handling script.

  Note: The all and --local-files parameters are scheduled to be removed in a forthcoming update.

Connect node to Netdata Cloud during installation

The kickstart.sh script accepts additional parameters to automatically connect your node to Netdata Cloud immediately after installation. Find the token and rooms strings by signing in to Netdata Cloud, then clicking on Connect Nodes in the Spaces management area.

• --claim-token: Specify a unique claiming token associated with your Space in Netdata Cloud to be used to connect to the node after the install.
• --claim-rooms: Specify a comma-separated list of tokens for each War Room this node should appear in.
• --claim-proxy: Specify a proxy to use when connecting to the cloud in the form of socks5[h]://[user:pass@]host:ip for a SOCKS5 proxy, or http://[user:pass@]host:ip for an HTTP(S) proxy. See connecting through a proxy for details.
• --claim-url: Specify a URL to use when connecting to the cloud. Defaults to https://app.netdata.cloud.

For example:

bash <(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh) --claim-token=TOKEN --claim-rooms=ROOM1,ROOM2

Please note that to run it you will either need to have root privileges or run it with the user that is running the agent, more details on the Connect an agent without root privileges section.

Verify script integrity

To use md5sum to verify the integrity of the kickstart.sh script you will download using the one-line command above, run the following:

[ "146d9b21dc692e93b3856da92aa46b7e" = "$(curl -Ss https://my-netdata.io/kickstart.sh | md5sum | cut -d ' ' -f 1)" ] && echo "OK, VALID" || echo "FAILED, INVALID"

If the script is valid, this command will return OK, VALID.

What's next?

When you're finished with installation, check out our single-node or infrastructure monitoring quickstart guides based on your use case.

Or, skip straight to configuring the Netdata Agent.

Read through Netdata's documentation, which is structured based on actions and solutions, to enable features like health monitoring, alarm notifications, long-term metrics storage, exporting to external databases, and more.