Coming Soon!
Snow Owl is provided in the following package formats:
Package
Description
zip/tar.gz
The zip and tar.gz packages are suitable for installation on any system and are the easiest choice for getting started with Snow Owl on most systems.
Install Snow Owl with tar.gz or zip
rpm
The rpm package is suitable for installation on Red Hat, Centos, SLES, OpenSuSE and other RPM-based systems. RPMs may be downloaded from the Downloads section.
Install Snow Owl with RPM
deb
The deb package is suitable for Debian, Ubuntu, and other Debian-based systems. Debian packages may be downloaded from the Downloads section.
Install Snow Owl with Debian Package
docker
Images are available for running Snow Owl as Docker containers. They may be downloaded from the official Docker Hub Registry. Install Snow Owl with Docker
Snow Owl is provided as a .zip and as a .tar.gz package. These packages can be used to install Snow Owl on any system and are the easiest package format to use when trying out Snow Owl.
The latest stable version of Snow Owl can be found on the Snow Owl Releases page.
Snow Owl requires Java 8 or later. Use the official Oracle distribution or an open-source distribution such as OpenJDK.
zip packageThe .zip archive for Snow Owl can be downloaded and installed as follows:
.tar.gz packageThe .tar.gz archive for Snow Owl can be downloaded and installed as follows:
Snow Owl can be started from the command line as follows:
By default, Snow Owl runs in the foreground, prints its logs to the standard output (stdout), and can be stopped by pressing Ctrl-C.
All scripts packaged with Snow Owl assume that Bash is available at /bin/bash. As such, Bash should be available at this path either directly or via a symbolic link.
You can test that your instance is running by sending an HTTP request to Snow Owl's status endpoint:
which should give you a response like this:
You can send the Snow Owl process to the background using the combination of nohup and the & character:
Log messages can be found in the $SO_HOME/serviceability/logs/ directory.
To shut down Snow Owl, you can kill the process ID directly:
or using the provided shutdown script:
.zip and .tar.gz archives:The .zip and .tar.gz packages are entirely self-contained. All files and directories are, by default, contained within $SO_HOME — the directory created when unpacking the archive.
This is very convenient because you don’t have to create any directories to start using Snow Owl, and uninstalling Snow Owl is as easy as removing the $SO_HOME directory. However, it is advisable to change the default locations of the config directory, the data directory, and the logs directory so that you do not delete important data later on.
You now have a test Snow Owl environment set up. Before you start serious development or go into production with Snow Owl, you must do some additional setup:
Learn how to configure Snow Owl.
Configure important Snow Owl settings.
Configure important system settings.
Type
Description
Default Location
Setting
home
Snow Owl home directory or $SO_HOME
Directory created by unpacking the archive
bin
Binary scripts including startup/shutdown to start/stop the instance
$SO_HOME/bin
conf
Configuration files including snowowl.yml
$SO_HOME/configuration
data
The location of the data files and resources.
$SO_HOME/resources
path.data
logs
Log files location.
$SO_HOME/serviceability/logs
Coming Soon!
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 Install Snow Owl with .zip or .tar.gz instead.
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.
Use the chkconfig command to configure Snow Owl to start automatically when the system boots up:
Snow Owl can be started and stopped using the service command:
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/.
To configure Snow Owl to start automatically when the system boots up, run the following commands:
Snow Owl can be started and stopped as follows:
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/.
You can test that your Snow Owl instance is running by sending an HTTP request to:
which should give you a response something like this:
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.
Snow Owl loads its configuration from the /etc/snowowl/snowowl.yml file by default. The format of this config file is explained in Configuring Snow Owl.
The RPM places config files, logs, and the data directory in the appropriate locations for an RPM-based system:
You now have a test Snow Owl environment set up. Before you start serious development or go into production with Snow Owl, you must do some additional setup:
Learn how to configure Snow Owl.
Configure important Snow Owl settings.
Configure important system settings.
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