Snow Owl Docs
9.x
9.x
  • Introduction
  • Quick Start
    • Create your first Resource
    • Import SNOMED CT
    • Find concepts by ID or term
    • Find concepts using ECL
    • Next steps
  • Setup and Administration
    • Plan your deployment
      • Technology stack
      • Hardware requirements
      • Software requirements
    • Configuration
      • Release package
      • Folder structure
      • Get SSL certificate (optional)
      • Preload dataset (optional)
      • Configure Elastic Cloud (optional)
      • System settings
      • Spin up the service
    • Upgrade Snow Owl
    • Backup and restore
      • Backup
      • Restore
    • User management
    • Advanced installation methods
      • Install Snow Owl
        • Using an archive
        • Using RPM
        • Using DEB
      • System configuration
        • Disable swapping
        • File descriptors
        • Virtual memory
        • Number of threads
      • Configure Snow Owl
      • Start Snow Owl
      • Stop Snow Owl
    • Advanced configuration
      • Setting JVM options
      • Logging configuration
      • Elasticsearch configuration
      • Security
        • File realm
        • LDAP realm
  • Terminology Standards
    • SNOMED CT
      • Extensions and Snow Owl
      • Scenarios
        • Single Edition
        • Single Extension Authoring
        • Multi Extension Authoring
      • Development
      • Releases
      • Upgrading
    • LOINC
    • Socialstyrelsen Standards
      • ICD-10-SE
      • ICF
      • KVÃ… (KKÃ…/KMÃ…)
  • Content syndication
  • REST APIs
    • FHIR API
      • CodeSystem
      • ValueSet
      • ConceptMap
    • Native API
      • Resource management
      • Content access
      • Content management
      • SNOMED CT API
        • Branching
        • Compare
        • Concepts
        • Reference Sets
  • Release notes
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On this page
  • Download and install
  • Running Snow Owl with SysV init
  • Running Snow Owl with systemd
  • Checking that Snow Owl is running
  • Configuring Snow Owl
  • Directory layout of RPM
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  1. Setup and Administration
  2. Advanced installation methods
  3. Install Snow Owl

Using RPM

Last updated 1 year ago

The RPM for Snow Owl can be downloaded from the Downloads section. It can be used to install Snow Owl on any RPM-based system such as OpenSuSE, SLES, CentOS, Red Hat, and Oracle Enterprise.

RPM install is not supported on distributions with old versions of RPM, such as SLES 11 and CentOS 5. Please see instead.

Download and install

wget https://github.com/b2ihealthcare/snow-owl/releases/download/<version>/snow-owl-oss-<version>.rpm
wget https://github.com/b2ihealthcare/snow-owl/releases/download/<version>/snow-owl-oss-<version>.rpm.sha512
shasum -a 512 -c snow-owl-oss-<version>.rpm.sha512 # Compares the SHA of the downloaded RPM and the published checksum, which should output `snow-owl-oss-<version>.rpm: OK`.
sudo rpm --install snow-owl-oss-<version>.rpm

On systemd-based distributions, the installation scripts will attempt to set kernel parameters (e.g., vm.max_map_count); you can skip this by masking the systemd-sysctl.service unit.

Running Snow Owl with SysV init

Use the chkconfig command to configure Snow Owl to start automatically when the system boots up:

sudo chkconfig --add snowowl

Snow Owl can be started and stopped using the service command:

sudo -i service snowowl start
sudo -i service snowowl stop

If Snow Owl fails to start for any reason, it will print the reason for failure to STDOUT. Log files can be found in /var/log/snowowl/.

Running Snow Owl with systemd

To configure Snow Owl to start automatically when the system boots up, run the following commands:

sudo /bin/systemctl daemon-reload
sudo /bin/systemctl enable snowowl.service

Snow Owl can be started and stopped as follows:

sudo systemctl start snowowl.service
sudo systemctl stop snowowl.service

These commands provide no feedback as to whether Snow Owl was started successfully or not. Instead, this information will be written in the log files located in /var/log/snowowl/.

Checking that Snow Owl is running

You can test that your Snow Owl instance is running by sending an HTTP request to:

curl http://localhost:8080/snowowl/info

which should give you a response something like this:

{
  "version": "<version_number>",
  "description": "You Know, for Terminologies",
  "repositories": {
    "items": [
      {
        "id": "snomedStore",
        "health": "GREEN"
      }
    ]
  }
}

Configuring Snow Owl

Snow Owl defaults to using /etc/snowowl for runtime configuration. The ownership of this directory and all files in this directory are set to root:snowowl on package installation and the directory has the setgid flag set so that any files and subdirectories created under /etc/snowowl are created with this ownership as well (e.g., if a keystore is created using the keystore tool). It is expected that this be maintained so that the Snow Owl process can read the files under this directory via the group permissions.

Directory layout of RPM

The RPM places config files, logs, and the data directory in the appropriate locations for an RPM-based system:

Type
Description
Default Location
Setting

home

Snow Owl home directory or $SO_HOME

/usr/share/snowowl

bin

Binary scripts including startup/shutdown to start/stop the instance

/usr/share/snowowl/bin

conf

Configuration files including snowowl.yml

/etc/snowowl

data

The location of the data files and resources.

/var/lib/snowowl

path.data

logs

Log files location.

/var/log/snowowl

Snow Owl loads its configuration from the /etc/snowowl/snowowl.yml file by default. The format of this config file is explained in .

Install Snow Owl with .zip or .tar.gz
Configuring Snow Owl
SO_PATH_CONF