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:
Supported operating systems and architectures
The following table indicates the current supported NATS server build combinations for operating systems and architectures.
| Operating System | Architectures | Status |
|---|---|---|
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.
| Cluster Size | CPU cores | Memory | Subscribers | Publishers | Publish Rate | Total Message Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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.
| Cluster Size | CPU cores | Memory | Subscribers | Publishers | Publish Rate | Total Message Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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 |
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:
On Mac OS:
To test your installation (provided the executable is visible to your shell):
Typing nats-server should output something like
On Linux:
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
NATS v2 and Go Modules
If you are having issues when using the recent versions of NATS and Go modules such as:
To fix it:
Update your
go.modusing the latest tags, for example for both NATS and NATS Streaming clients:
Or if you want to import the NATS Server v2 to embed it, notice the /v2 after the nats-server module name. If that is not present, then go modules will not fetch it and would accidentally end up with 1.4.1 version of the server.
If embedding both NATS Streaming and NATS Servers:
Next, update the imports within the repo:
(Recommended) Run Go fmt as the rename will affect the proper ordering of the imports
Gotchas when using go get
go getWhen using go get to fetch the client, include an extra slash at the end of the repo. For example:
When trying to fetch the latest version of the server with go get, you have to add v2 at the end:
Otherwise, go get will fetch the v1.4.1 version of the server, which is also named (gnatsd), the previous name for nats-server.
In order to use an older tag, you will have to use the previous name (gnatsd) otherwise it will result in go mod parsing errors.
For more information you can review the original issue in GitHub.
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