Installation

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

Prerequisites

Before installing Rally, please ensure that the following packages are installed:

  • Python 3.4 or better available as python3 on the path (verify with: python3 --version which should print Python 3.4.0 or higher)
  • Python3 dev (for header files) (python3-dev package)
  • pip3 available on the path (verify with pip3 --version)
  • git 1.9 or better
  • JDK 8 or 9 on all machines where you want to launch Elasticsearch (if you use Rally just as a load generator, no JDK is required)

Rally does not support Windows and is only actively tested on Mac OS X and Linux.

Note

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

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 check the installation instructions of psutil in this case. Keep in mind that Rally is based on Python 3 and you need to install the Python 3 header files instead of the Python 2 header files on Linux.

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.

Next Steps

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