Installing a NATS Server
NATS philosophy is simplicity. Installation is just decompressing a zip file and copying the binary to an appropriate directory; you can also use your favorite package manager. Here's a list of different ways you can install or run NATS:
See also installing the NATS client
Supported operating systems and architectures
The following table indicates the current supported NATS server build combinations for operating systems and architectures.
Darwin (macOS)
amd64, arm64
Stable
Linux
amd64, 386, arm6, arm7, arm64, mips64le, s390x
Stable
Windows
amd64, 386, arm6, arm7, arm64
Stable
FreeBSD
amd64
Stable
NetBSD
-
Experimental
IBM z/OS
-
Experimental
Note, not all installation methods below have distributions for all OS and architecture combinations.
Hardware requirements
The NATS server itself has minimal hardware requirements to support small edge devices, but can take advantage of more resources if available.
CPU should be considered in accepting TLS connections. After a network partition, every disconnected client will attempt to connect to a NATS server in the cluster simultaneously, so CPU on those servers will momentarily spike. When there are many clients this can be mitigated with reconnect jitter settings, and errors can be reduced with longer TLS timeouts, and scaling up cluster sizes.
We highly recommend testing to see if smaller, cheaper machines suffice for your workload - often they do! We suggest starting here and adjusting resources after load testing specific to your environment. When using cloud provider instance types make sure the node has a sufficient NIC to support the required bandwidth for the application needs.
For high throughput use cases, the network interface card (NIC) or the available bandwidth are often the bottleneck, so ensure the hardware or cloud provider instance types are sufficient for your needs.
Core NATS
The table below notes the minimum number of cores and memory with the different combinations of publishers, subscribers, and message rate where the single server or cluster remained stable (not slow nor hitting an out-of-memory). These were tested inside containers with GOMEMLIMIT set to 90% of the memory allocation and with a 2021-era CPU and SSD for JetStream storage.
All message rates are per second.
1
1
32 MiB
1
100
1000
100,000
1
1
64 MiB
1
1000
100
100,000
3
1
32 MiB
1
1000
100
100,000
3
1
64 MiB
1
1000
100
100,000
With JetStream
This table follows the same pattern as above, however the published messages are being received by a stream using file storage with the one replica or three (for a cluster size of three). The subscriber is relying on a "pull consumer" for fetching messages.
1
1
32 MiB
1
10
100
1,000
1
1
32 MiB
1
100
10
1,000
1
1
64 MiB
1
100
100
10,000
1
1
64 MiB
1
1000
10
10,000
3
1
32 MiB
1
100
10
1,000
3
1
64 MiB
1
100
100
10,000
3
1
64 MiB
1
1000
10
10,000
3
1
256 MiB
1
1000
100
100,000
Getting the binary from the command line
The simplest way to just get the binary of a release of nats-server for your machine is to use the following shell command.
For example, to get the binary for version 2.10.20 you would use:
To get the current very latest version (which may be ahead of the current last officially released version!) use @latest, you can also use a tag or a specific branch after the @.
Installing via Docker
With Docker, you can install the server easily without scattering binaries and other artifacts on your system. The only pre-requisite is to install docker.
To run NATS on Docker:
More information on containerized NATS is available here.
Installing via a Package Manager
On Windows, using scoop.sh:
On Mac OS:
Arch Linux:
For Arch users, there is an AUR package that you can install with:
To test your installation (provided the executable is visible to your shell):
Typing nats-server should output something like
Downloading a Release Build
You can find the latest release of nats-server on the nats-io/nats-server GitHub releases page.
From the releases page, copy the link to the release archive file of your choice and download it using curl -L.
For example, assuming version X.Y.Z of the server and a Linux AMD64:
and finally:
Installing From the Source
If you have Go installed, installing the binary is easy:
This mechanism will install a build of the main branch, which almost certainly will not be a released version. If you are a developer and want to play with the latest, this is the easiest way.
To test your installation (provided $GOPATH/bin is in your path) by typing nats-server which should output something like
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