Installation

Release versions of Benji are available on PyPi and can installed via pip. In addition there are two container images: One generic image and an extended one for the use with Kubernetes. The generic ghcr.io/elementalnet/benji image is the easiest and fastest way to try out Benji but can also be used in production. It includes all dependencies and extra features listed below (including RBD and iSCSI support). See section Containerized Benji for more information about the images.

Fedora 27 and up

The distribution includes a supported version of Python 3. Make sure to install the latest available update.

openSUSE

The distribution includes a supported version of Python 3. Benji is also available through the official repositories of openSUSE Tumbleweed. For older, versioned releases of openSUSE you need to add the devel project:

zypper ar obs://Archiving:Backup ab-benji
zypper ref

Then you can install it via:

zypper in benji

RHEL/CentOS 7

A recent version of Python 3 is included in the EPEL repository:

yum install -y epel-release
yum install -y python36-devel python36-pip python36-libs python36-setuptools

Ubuntu 16.04

This version of Ubuntu doesn’t have a current Python installation. But Python 3 can be installed via private repository:

apt-get update
apt-get install --no-install-recommends software-properties-common python-software-properties
add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
apt-get update
apt-get install --no-install-recommends python3.6 python3.6-venv python3.6-dev git gcc

Note

For more information about this Personal Package Archive (PPA) please see https://launchpad.net/~deadsnakes/+archive/ubuntu/ppa.

Common to All Distributions

After installing a recent Python version, it is now time to install Benji and its dependencies:

# Create new virtual environment
python3.6 -m venv /usr/local/benji
# Activate it (your shell prompt should change)
. /usr/local/benji/bin/activate
# Alternative A: Install a specific released version from PyPI (0.8.0)
pip install benji==0.8.0
# Alternative B: Install the latest released version from PyPI
pip install benji
# Alternative C: Install the latest version from the master branch of the Git repository
pip install git+https://github.com/elemental-lf/benji

For certain features additional dependencies are needed. These are referenced by a symbolic name:

  • s3: AWS S3 object storage support

  • b2: Backblaze’s B2 Cloud object storage support

  • compression: Compression support

Specify any extra extra features as a comma delimited list in square brackets after the package URL:

pip install benji[compression,s3,readcache,b2]==0.8.0

To upgrade an existing installation use the same command line but add the --upgrade option.

Note

It is recommended to install and use the compression feature for almost all use cases as it decreases storage space usage significantly.

Ceph RBD Support

The Ceph RBD support cannot be installed via pip like the other dependencies as the Python bindings for librados and librbd are not available on PyPi. Depending on the distribution and the used Ceph version pre-built packages are available:

Note

If Benji is installed in a virtual environment as suggested above, system-wide Python packages are not available by default. To access system-wide Python packages like Ceph’s Python bindings the virtual environment needs to be created with the –system-site-packages option.

If all other options fail, it is still possible to directly install the Python binding from the Ceph source code. For RHEL/CentOS 7 the procedure looks like this:

cat >/etc/yum.repos.d/ceph.repo <<EOF
[ceph]
name=Ceph packages for \$basearch
baseurl=https://download.ceph.com/rpm-{ceph-release}/{distro}/\$basearch
enabled=1
priority=2
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://download.ceph.com/keys/release.asc

[ceph-noarch]
name=Ceph noarch packages
baseurl=https://download.ceph.com/rpm-{ceph-release}/{distro}/noarch
enabled=1
priority=2
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://download.ceph.com/keys/release.asc

[ceph-source]
name=Ceph source packages
baseurl=https://download.ceph.com/rpm-{ceph-release}/{distro}/SRPMS
enabled=0
priority=2
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=https://download.ceph.com/keys/release.asc
EOF

export CEPH_CODENAME="nautilus"
export CEPH_DISTRO="el7"
sed -i -e "s/{ceph-release}/$CEPH_CODENAME/" -e "s/{distro}/$CEPH_DISTRO/" /etc/yum.repos.d/ceph.repo

yum install -y epel-release
yum install -y git gcc make python36-devel python36-pip python36-libs python36-setuptools librados-devel librbd-devel

export VENV_DIR=/usr/local/benji
python3.6 -m venv $VENV_DIR
. $VENV_DIR/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip

export CEPH_VERSION=14.2.2
# The links are necessary as Ceph's setup.py searches for these names
ln -s /usr/bin/python3.6-config $VENV_DIR/bin/python-config
ln -s /usr/bin/python3.6m-x86_64-config $VENV_DIR/bin/python3.6m-x86_64-config
pip install cython
pip install "git+https://github.com/ceph/ceph@v$CEPH_VERSION#subdirectory=src/pybind/rados"
pip install "git+https://github.com/ceph/ceph@v$CEPH_VERSION#subdirectory=src/pybind/rbd"

Note

Benji has only been tested with Luminous and later versions of Ceph’s Python bindings.