Snow Owl requires at least Java 8. Specifically as of this writing, it is recommended that you use the Oracle JDK version 1.8.0_171. Java installation varies from platform to platform so we won’t go into those details here. Oracle’s recommended installation documentation can be found on Oracle’s website. Suffice to say, before you install Snow Owl, please check your Java version first by running (and then install/upgrade accordingly if needed):
Once we have Java set up, we can then download and run Snow Owl. The binaries are available at the Releases pages. For each release, you have a choice among a zip or tar archive, a DEB or RPM package.
For simplicity, let's use a zip file.
Let's download the most recent Snow Owl release as follows:
Then extract it as follows:
It will then create a bunch of files and folders in your current directory. We then go into the bin directory as follows:
And now we are ready to start the instance:
If everything goes well with the installation, you should see a bunch of log messages that look like below: