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Installing Nomad

Nomad is available as a pre-compiled binary or as a package for several operating systems. You can also build Nomad from source.

If you are interested in trialing Nomad without installing it locally, see the Quickstart for options to get started with Nomad.

You can download a precompiled binary and run it on your machine locally. You can also verify the binary using the available SHA-256 sums. After downloading Nomad, unzip the package. Make sure that the nomad binary is available on your PATH before continuing with the other guides.

Post-installation steps

These steps are considered optional but can be helpful for running Nomad and to take advantage of additional Nomad functionalities.

Add the Nomad binary to your system path

Permanently add a new location to your path by editing your shell's settings file (usually called something like ~/.bashrc, where the part of the filename after the . and before rc is the name of your shell). In that file you should see a line that starts with export PATH=, followed by a colon-separated list of locations. Add the location of the Nomad binary to that list and save the file. Then reload your shell's configuration with the command source ~/.bashrc, replacing bash with the name of your shell.

Install CNI plugins

Nomad uses CNI plugins to configure network namespaces when using the bridge network mode. All Linux Nomad client nodes using network namespaces must have CNI plugins installed.

The following commands install the CNI reference plugins.

$ curl -L -o cni-plugins.tgz "https://github.com/containernetworking/plugins/releases/download/v1.0.0/cni-plugins-linux-$( [ $(uname -m) = aarch64 ] && echo arm64 || echo amd64)"-v1.0.0.tgz && \
  sudo mkdir -p /opt/cni/bin && \
  sudo tar -C /opt/cni/bin -xzf cni-plugins.tgz

Ensure your Linux operating system distribution has been configured to allow container traffic through the bridge network to be routed via iptables. These tunables can be set as follows.

$ echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-arptables && \
  echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-ip6tables && \
  echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/net/bridge/bridge-nf-call-iptables

To preserve these settings on startup of a client node, add a file including the following to /etc/sysctl.d/ or remove the file your Linux distribution puts in that directory.

/etc/sysctl.d/bridge.conf

net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-arptables = 1
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-ip6tables = 1
net.bridge.bridge-nf-call-iptables = 1

Verify cgroup controllers

On Linux, Nomad uses cgroups to control resource usage of tasks. If one or more required cgroups are unavailable, Nomad will disable resource controls that require cgroups entirely. With cgroups v2, you can verify that you have all required controllers as follows:

$ cat /sys/fs/cgroup/cgroup.controllers
cpuset cpu io memory pids

See the documentation on cgroup controller requirements for more details.

Verify the Installation

To verify Nomad was installed correctly, try the nomad command.

$ nomad

You should see help output, similar to the following.

Usage: nomad [-version] [-help] [-autocomplete-(un)install] <command> [args]

Common commands:
    run         Run a new job or update an existing job
    stop        Stop a running job
    status      Display the status output for a resource
    alloc       Interact with allocations
    job         Interact with jobs
    node        Interact with nodes
    agent       Runs a Nomad agent

Other commands:
    acl                 Interact with ACL policies and tokens
    agent-info          Display status information about the local agent
    config              Interact with configurations
    deployment          Interact with deployments
    eval                Interact with evaluations
    exec                Execute commands in task
    fmt                 Rewrites Nomad config and job files to canonical format
    license             Interact with Nomad Enterprise License
    login               Login to Nomad using an auth method
    monitor             Stream logs from a Nomad agent
    namespace           Interact with namespaces
    operator            Provides cluster-level tools for Nomad operators
    plugin              Inspect plugins
    quota               Interact with quotas
    recommendation      Interact with the Nomad recommendation endpoint
    scaling             Interact with the Nomad scaling endpoint
    sentinel            Interact with Sentinel policies
    server              Interact with servers
    service             Interact with registered services
    system              Interact with the system API
    tls                 Generate Self Signed TLS Certificates for Nomad
    ui                  Open the Nomad Web UI
    var                 Interact with variables
    version             Prints the Nomad version
    volume              Interact with volumes

Compiling from Source

To compile from source, you will need Go installed at the version described by the .go-version file. You should properly configure your Go environment, including setting a GOPATH environment variable and ensuring GOPATH/bin is within your PATH. A copy of git is also needed in your PATH.

  1. Clone the Nomad repository from GitHub into your GOPATH:

    $ mkdir -p $GOPATH/src/github.com/hashicorp && cd $_
$ git clone https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad.git
$ cd nomad

  2. Bootstrap the project. This will download and compile libraries and tools needed to compile Nomad:

    $ make bootstrap

  3. Build Nomad for your current system and put the binary in ./bin/ (relative to the git checkout). The make dev target is just a shortcut that builds nomad for only your local build environment (no cross-compiled targets).

    $ make dev