Table of Contents

Prerequisites

For single node setup

Set up object storage

Set up Masters

One master is fine
Set up masters
Add volume servers

Check the object store setup

Set up file storage

Choose filer store
Setup filer
Setup multiple filers

Additional components

Setup S3 API
Set up FUSE mount
Cluster Maintenance
Other

A robust production setup requires more configuration -- and care -- than the Getting Started guide. There are multiple layers of components. Please follow the steps to set them up from bottom up, one by one.

Set up object storage
- Set up Masters
- Add volume servers
Set up file storage
- Choose filer store
- Setup Filer

And then, choose the component you want to set up

Set up S3
Set up FUSE mount
Cluster Maintenance

Prerequisites

Make sure the ports are open. By default

server	http port	gRPC port
Master	9333	19333
Volume	8080	18080
Filer	8888	18888
S3	8333

If you have multi-homed servers (many IP addresses and interfaces), ensure SeaweedFS uses the correct IP for cluster communication. Append -ip=xx.xx.xx.xx to specify the appropriate address.

If you wish to use a different IP address for user-facing services, then set -ip.bind=yy.yy.yy.yy as well.

For single node setup

You can just use weed server -filer -s3 -ip=xx.xx.xx.xx, to have one master, one volume server, one filer, and one S3 API server running.

It is better to have several volumes running on one machine, so that if one volume is compacting, the other volumes can still serve read and write requests. The default volume size is 30GB. So if your server does not have multiple 30GB empty spaces, you need to reduce the volume size.

weed server -filer -s3 -ip=xx.xx.xx.xx -volume.max=0 -master.volumeSizeLimitMB=1024

Set up object storage

Set up Masters

One master is fine

If there are 2 machines, it is not possible to achieve consensus. Just do not bother to set up multiple masters.

Even for large clusters, it is totally fine to have one single master. The load on master is very light. It is unlikely to go down. You can always just restart it since it only has soft states collected from volume servers.

Set up masters

OK. Your CTO just wants multiple masters. To do so, see Failover Master Server for details.

Assuming your machine has a directory: /data/seaweedfs. Run these on 3 machines with ip addresses as ip1, ip2, ip3.

weed master -mdir=/data/seaweedfs/master -peers=ip1:9333,ip2:9333,ip3:9333 -ip=ip1
weed master -mdir=/data/seaweedfs/master -peers=ip1:9333,ip2:9333,ip3:9333 -ip=ip2
weed master -mdir=/data/seaweedfs/master -peers=ip1:9333,ip2:9333,ip3:9333 -ip=ip3

Additional notes:

Depending on the available disk space on each volume server, the master may need to reduce maximum volume size, e.g., add -volumeSizeLimitMB=1024. This will ensure each volume server has several volumes. On the note, you can't change volumeSizeLimitMB later.
Since it is for production, you may also want to add -metrics.address=<Prometheus gateway address>. See System Metrics.

Add volume servers

Adding volume servers is easy. Actually this is much easier than most other systems. If you do not specify -max=0 then the number of volumes is limited to 8. You can specify a non-zero value, if you wish to explicitly manage your disk space.

For machine with one disk to use

Run this to setup:

weed volume -mserver=ip1:9333,ip2:9333,ip3:9333 -dataCenter=dc1 -rack=rack1 -dir=/data/seaweedfs/volume -ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -max=0

For machine with multiple disks

Configure the -dir to be comma separated directory list, and set -max for corresponding directories, assuming the /data/seaweedfs/volume[x] are on different disks.

weed volume -mserver=ip1:9333,ip2:9333,ip3:9333 -dataCenter=dc1 -rack=rack1 -ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -dir=/data/seaweedfs/volume1,/data/seaweedfs/volume2,/data/seaweedfs/volume3 -max=0,0,0

Do not use multiple directories on the same disk. The automatic volume count limit will double count the capacity.

For machine with multiple disks

You can also create multiple volume servers on different ports. It could be easier for changing disks.

weed volume -mserver=ip1:9333,ip2:9333,ip3:9333 -dataCenter=dc1 -rack=rack1 -dir=/data/seaweedfs/volume1 -ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -max=0 -port=8081
weed volume -mserver=ip1:9333,ip2:9333,ip3:9333 -dataCenter=dc1 -rack=rack1 -dir=/data/seaweedfs/volume2 -ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -max=0 -port=8082
weed volume -mserver=ip1:9333,ip2:9333,ip3:9333 -dataCenter=dc1 -rack=rack1 -dir=/data/seaweedfs/volume3 -ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -max=0 -port=8083

Additional notes:

If the disk space is huge and there will be a lot of volumes, configure -index=leveldb to reduce memory load.
For busy volume servers, -compactionMBps can help to throttle the background jobs, e.g., compaction, balancing, encoding/decoding,etc.
After adding volume servers, there will not be data rebalancing. It is generally not a good idea to actively rebalance data, which cost network bandwidth and slows down other servers. Data are written to new servers after new volumes are created on them. You can use weed shell and run volume.balance -force to manually balance them.

Check the object store setup

Now the object store setup is completed. You can visit http://<master>:9333/ to check it around.

Ensure the Free volume count is not zero.
Try to assign some file IDs to trigger a volume allocation.

If you only use SeaweedFS object store, that is all.

Set up file storage

Choose filer store

If currently only one filer is needed, just use one filer with default filer store. It is very scalable.

You can always migrate to other scalable filer store by export and import the filer meta data. See Filer Stores

Run weed scaffold -config=filer to generate an example filer.toml file. This file choose leveldb2 as the filer store by default which stores file meta in local on disk. leveldb2 only support one filer.

The filer store to choose depends on your requirements, your existing data stores, etc.

Setup filer

weed filer -ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx -master=ip1:9333,ip2:9333,ip3:9333 -dataCenter=dc1 -rack=rack1

Additional notes:

Both weed filer and weed master has option -defaultReplicaPlacement. weed master uses it for the object store, while weed filer uses it for files. The weed filer default setting is "000", and overwrites the one weed master has.
-encryptVolumeData option is when you need to encrypt the data on volume servers. See Filer Data Encryption

Setup multiple filers

If using shared filer store, the filer itself is stateless. You can create multiple peer filers. The metadata and data are all shared. This is recommended for production.

Additional components

Setup S3 API

Follow Amazon S3 API to generate a json config file, to assign accessKey and secretKey for different identities, and give read/write permissions to different buckets.

Start s3 together with filer. This avoids the setup for s3 to support multiple filers.

weed filer -s3 -s3.config=<config.json> -s3.port=8333

The endpoint is http://<s3_server_host>:8333.

Set up FUSE mount

Run

weed mount -filer=<filer_host:filer_port> -cacheCapacityMB=xxx -chunkSizeLimitMB=4 -dir=mount_point_dir

-cacheCapacityMB means file chunk read cache capacity in MB with tiered cache(memory + disk), default 0 which means chunk cache for read is disabled.
-chunkSizeLimitMB local write buffer size, also chunk large file, default 2 MB.
-replication is the replication level for each file. It overwrites replication settings on both filer and master.
-volumeServerAccess=[direct|publicUrl|filerProxy] is used if master, volume server, and filer are inside a cluster, but weed mount is outside of the cluster. With this option set to filerProxy, only filer needs to be exposed to outside. All read write access to volume servers will be proxied by filer.

Cluster Maintenance

In a cluster, volume servers can go down. But automatic rebalancing will be problematic. It can cause unexpected busy network activities. For example, the heartbeat of a volume server may come and go, causing an unnecessarily busy system. Currently recommended strategy is to keep the existing data readonly, and automatically add new writable volumes.

There are volume.balance and volume.fix.replication commands in weed shell. You can configure them to run during off hours.

See Volume Management for details.

Other

Setup metrics, see System Metrics
Setup security, see Security Configuration
If running out of in house machines
- Enable Erasure Coding for warm storage to save replica spaces.
- Move warm data to Cloud Tier
Learn to use weed shell, to check the volume status, mount/unmount/move/balance/copy/delete a volume, fsck for the volume, erasure encoding/decoding, etc.

Introduction

API

Configuration

Filer

Filer Stores

Advanced Filer Configurations

FUSE Mount

WebDAV

Cloud Drive

AWS S3 API

AWS IAM

Machine Learning

TensorFlow with SeaweedFS

HDFS

Replication and Backup

Async Replication to another Filer [Deprecated]
Async Backup
Async Filer Metadata Backup
Async Replication to Cloud [Deprecated]
Kubernetes Backups and Recovery with K8up

Prerequisites

For single node setup

Set up object storage

Set up Masters

One master is fine

Set up masters

Add volume servers

Check the object store setup

Set up file storage

Choose filer store

Setup filer

Setup multiple filers

Additional components

Setup S3 API

Set up FUSE mount

Cluster Maintenance

Other

Introduction

API

Configuration

Filer

Filer Stores

Advanced Filer Configurations

FUSE Mount

WebDAV

Cloud Drive

AWS S3 API

AWS IAM

Machine Learning

HDFS

Replication and Backup

Messaging

Use Cases

Operations

Advanced

Security

Misc Use Case Examples