Installation

This is the detailed installation guide for Rally. If you are in a hurry you can check the quickstart guide.

Hardware Requirements

Use an SSD on the load generator machine. If you run bulk-indexing benchmarks, Rally will read one or more data files from disk. Usually, you will configure multiple clients and each client reads a portion of the data file. To the disk this appears as a random access pattern where spinning disks perform poorly. To avoid an accidental bottleneck on client-side you should therefore use an SSD on each load generator machine.

Prerequisites

Rally does not support Windows and is only actively tested on MacOS and Linux. Before installing Rally, please ensure that the following packages are installed.

Python

  • Python 3.4 or better available as python3 on the path. Verify with: python3 --version.
  • Python3 header files (included in the Python3 development package).
  • pip3 available on the path. Verify with pip3 --version.

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install gcc python3-pip python3-dev

RHEL 6/ CentOS 6

Tested on CentOS release 6.9 (Final).

Note

You will need to enable EPEL before.

sudo yum install -y gcc python34.x86_64 python34-devel.x86_64 python34-setuptools.noarch
# installs pip as it is not available as an OS package
sudo python3 /usr/lib/python3.4/site-packages/easy_install.py pip

RHEL 7 / CentOS 7

Note

You will need to enable EPEL before.

Tested on CentOS Linux release 7.4.1708 (Core).

sudo yum install -y gcc python34.x86_64 python34-devel.x86_64 python34-pip.noarch

Amazon Linux

sudo yum install -y gcc python35-pip.noarch python35-devel.x86_64

MacOS

We recommend that you use Homebrew:

brew install python3

git

Git is not required if all of the following conditions are met:

  • You are using Rally only as a load generator (--pipeline=benchmark-only) or you are referring to Elasticsearch configurations with --team-path.
  • You create your own tracks and refer to them with --track-path.

In all other cases, Rally requires git 1.9 or better. Verify with git --version.

Debian / Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install git

Red Hat / CentOS / Amazon Linux

sudo yum install git

Note

If you use RHEL, please ensure to install a recent version of git via the Red Hat Software Collections.

MacOS

git is already installed on MacOS.

JDK

A JDK is required on all machines where you want to launch Elasticsearch. If you use Rally just as a load generator, no JDK is required.

We recommend to use Oracle JDK but you are free to use OpenJDK as well. For details on how to install a JDK, please see your operating system’s documentation pages.

Note

If you have Rally download, install and benchmark a local copy of Elasticsearch (i.e., the default Rally behavior) be sure to configure the Operating System (OS) of your Rally server with the recommended kernel settings

Installing Rally

Simply install Rally with pip: pip3 install esrally

Note

Depending on your system setup you may need to prepend this command with sudo.

If you get errors during installation, it is probably due to the installation of psutil which we use to gather system metrics like CPU utilization. Please ensure that you have installed the Python development package as documented in the prerequisites section above.

Non-sudo Install

If you don’t want to use sudo when installing Rally, installation is still possible but a little more involved:

  1. Specify the --user option when installing Rally (step 2 above), so the command to be issued is: python3 setup.py develop --user.
  2. Check the output of the install script or lookup the Python documentation on the variable site.USER_BASE to find out where the script is located. On Linux, this is typically ~/.local/bin.

You can now either add ~/.local/bin to your path or invoke Rally via ~/.local/bin/esrally instead of just esrally.

VirtualEnv Install

You can also use Virtualenv to install Rally into an isolated Python environment without sudo.

  1. Set up a new virtualenv environment in a directory with virtualenv --python=python3 .
  2. Activate the environment with source /path/to/virtualenv/dir/bin/activate
  3. Install Rally with pip install esrally

Whenever you want to use Rally, run the activation script (step 2 above) first. When you are done, simply execute deactivate in the shell to exit the virtual environment.

Offline Install

If you are in a corporate environment where your servers do not have any access to the Internet, you can use Rally’s offline installation package. Follow these steps to install Rally:

  1. Install all prerequisites as documented above.
  2. Download the offline installation package for the latest release and copy it to the target machine(s).
  3. Decompress the installation package with tar -xzf esrally-dist-*.tar.gz.
  4. Run the install script with sudo ./esrally-dist-*/install.sh.

Next Steps

After you have installed Rally, you need to configure it. Just run esrally configure or follow the configuration help page for more guidance.