Fedora, CentOS, or Red Hat

This section describes the steps needed to set up a single-node Citus cluster on your own Linux machine from RPM packages.

1. Install PostgreSQL 9.5 and the Citus extension

Locate the PostgreSQL 9.5 YUM repository for your Linux distribution in this list. Copy its URL and add the repository:

# add repository from URL you previously copied
sudo yum install -y <repository-url>

# install Citus extension
sudo yum install -y citus_95

2. Initialize the Cluster

Citus has two kinds of components, the master and the workers. The master coordinates queries and maintains metadata on where in the cluster each row of data is. The workers hold your data and respond to queries.

Let’s create directories for those nodes to store their data. For convenience in using PostgreSQL Unix domain socket connections we’ll use the postgres user.

# this user has access to sockets in /var/run/postgresql
sudo su - postgres

# include path to postgres binaries
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/pgsql-9.5/bin

cd ~
mkdir -p citus/master citus/worker1 citus/worker2

# create three normal postgres instances
initdb -D citus/master
initdb -D citus/worker1
initdb -D citus/worker2

The master needs to know where it can find the workers. To tell it you can run:

echo "localhost 9701" >> citus/master/pg_worker_list.conf
echo "localhost 9702" >> citus/master/pg_worker_list.conf

We will configure the PostgreSQL instances to use ports 9700 (for the master) and 9701, 9702 (for the workers). We assume those ports are available on your machine. Feel free to use different ports if they are in use.

Citus is a Postgres extension, to tell Postgres to use this extension you’ll need to add it to a configuration variable called shared_preload_libraries:

echo "shared_preload_libraries = 'citus'" >> citus/master/postgresql.conf
echo "shared_preload_libraries = 'citus'" >> citus/worker1/postgresql.conf
echo "shared_preload_libraries = 'citus'" >> citus/worker2/postgresql.conf

3. Start the master and workers

Let’s start the databases:

pg_ctl -D citus/master -o "-p 9700" -l master_logfile start
pg_ctl -D citus/worker1 -o "-p 9701" -l worker1_logfile start
pg_ctl -D citus/worker2 -o "-p 9702" -l worker2_logfile start

Above you added Citus to shared_preload_libraries. That lets it hook into some deep parts of Postgres, swapping out the query planner and executor. Here, we load the user-facing side of Citus (such as the functions you’ll soon call):

psql -p 9700 -c "CREATE EXTENSION citus;"
psql -p 9701 -c "CREATE EXTENSION citus;"
psql -p 9702 -c "CREATE EXTENSION citus;"

4. Verify that installation has succeeded

To verify that the installation has succeeded we check that the master node has picked up the desired worker configuration. First start the psql shell on the master node:

psql -p 9700 -c "select * from master_get_active_worker_nodes();"

You should see a row for each worker node including the node name and port.