Server overview and installation¶

Danger

This is a documentation for Centrifugo v2. The latest Centrifugo version is v3. Go to the centrifugal.dev for v3 docs.

Centrifugo server written in Go language. It's an open-source software, the source code is available on Github.

Centrifugo is built around Centrifuge library for Go language. That library defines custom protocol and message types which must be sent over various transports (Websocket, SockJS). Server clients use that protocol internally and provide simple API to features - making persistent connection, subscribing on channels, calling RPC commands and more.

Server documentation covers a lot of server concepts in detail. Here we start with ways to install Centrifugo on your system.

Install from binary release¶

Binary releases available on Github. Download latest release for your operating system, unpack it and you are done. Centrifugo is pre-built for:

Linux 64-bit (linux_amd64)
Linux 32-bit (linux_386)
MacOS (darwin_amd64)
Windows (windows_amd64)
FreeBSD (freebsd_amd64)
ARM v6 (linux_armv6)

Archives contain a single statically compiled binary centrifugo file which is ready to run:

./centrifugo -h

See version of Centrifugo:

./centrifugo version

Centrifugo server node requires configuration file with some secret keys. If you are new to Centrifugo then there is genconfig command which generates minimal required configuration file:

./centrifugo genconfig

It generates secret keys automatically and creates configuration file config.json in a current directory (by default) so you can finally run Centrifugo instance:

./centrifugo --config=config.json

We will talk about a configuration in detail in next sections.

You can also put or symlink centrifugo into your bin OS directory and run it from anywhere:

centrifugo --config=config.json

Docker image¶

Centrifugo server has docker image available on Docker Hub.

docker pull centrifugo/centrifugo

Run:

docker run --ulimit nofile=65536:65536 -v /host/dir/with/config/file:/centrifugo -p 8000:8000 centrifugo/centrifugo centrifugo -c config.json

Note that docker allows setting nofile limits in command-line arguments which is pretty important to handle lots of simultaneous persistent connections and not run out of open file limit (each connection requires one file descriptor). See also OS tuning chapter.

Docker-compose example¶

Create configuration file config.json:

{
  "v3_use_offset": true,
  "token_hmac_secret_key": "my_secret",
  "api_key": "my_api_key",
  "admin_password": "password",
  "admin_secret": "secret",
  "admin": true
}

Create docker-compose.yml:

centrifugo:
  container_name: centrifugo
  image: centrifugo/centrifugo:latest
  volumes:
    - ./config.json:/centrifugo/config.json
  command: centrifugo -c config.json
  ports:
    - 8000:8000
  ulimits:
    nofile:
      soft: 65535
      hard: 65535

Run with:

docker-compose up

Kubernetes Helm chart¶

Official Kubernetes Helm chart available and located on Github. Follow instructions in repository README to bootstrap Centrifugo inside your Kubernetes cluster.

RPM and DEB packages for Linux¶

Every time we make new Centrifugo release we upload rpm and deb packages for popular linux distributions on packagecloud.io.

At moment, we support versions of the following distributions:

64-bit Debian 8 Jessie
64-bit Debian 9 Stretch
64-bit Debian 10 Buster
64-bit Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial
64-bit Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic
64-bit Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa
64-bit Centos 7
64-bit Centos 8

See full list of available packages and installation instructions.

Centrifugo also works on 32-bit architecture, but we don't support packaging for it since 64-bit is more convenient for servers today.

With brew on MacOS¶

If you are developing on MacOS then you can install Centrifugo over brew:

brew tap centrifugal/centrifugo
brew install centrifugo

Build from source¶

You need Go language installed:

git clone https://github.com/centrifugal/centrifugo.git
cd centrifugo
go build
./centrifugo