Installing graphite 0.9.10 on debian squeeze – Not So Frequently Asked Questions

The graphing system I like the most is graphite. It’s very useful for a lot of things (fast, scalable, low resources consuming, etc, etc). Today I’ll explain how to install graphite 0.9.10 on Debian squeeze.

First of all, we install the requirements:
apt-get install python apache2 python-twisted python-memcache libapache2-mod-python python-django libpixman-1-0 python-cairo python-django-tagging

And then we make sure we don’t have installed whisper from debian’s repository, which is old and may have incompatibilities with the last version of graphite:
apt-get remove python-whisper
Then we install the application. I’ve build some .deb packages that can be used directly:
wget http://www.tomas.cat/blog/sites/default/files/python-carbon_0.9.10_all.deb wget http://www.tomas.cat/blog/sites/default/files/python-graphite-web_0.9.10_all.deb wget http://www.tomas.cat/blog/sites/default/files/python-whisper_0.9.10_all.deb dpkg -i python-carbon_0.9.10_all.deb python-graphite-web_0.9.10_all.deb python-whisper_0.9.10_all.deb

But if you don’t like mine, it’s ease to make them yourself with fpm (Effing package managers), a ruby app to build packages for different package managers. First we install ruby and fpm:
apt-get install ruby rubygems gem install fpm
Then we download graphite and we untar it:
wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/c/carbon/carbon-0.9.10.tar.gz#md5=1d85d91fe220ec69c0db3037359b691a wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/w/whisper/whisper-0.9.10.tar.gz#md5=218aadafcc0a606f269b1b91b42bde3f wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/g/graphite-web/graphite-web-0.9.10.tar.gz#md5=b6d743a254d208874ceeff0a53e825c1 tar zxf graphite-web-0.9.10.tar.gz tar zxf carbon-0.9.10.tar.gz tar zxf whisper-0.9.10.tar.gz

Finally we build the packages and install them:
/var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/fpm-0.4.22/bin/fpm --python-install-bin /opt/graphite/bin -s python -t deb carbon-0.9.10/setup.py /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/fpm-0.4.22/bin/fpm --python-install-bin /opt/graphite/bin -s python -t deb whisper-0.9.10/setup.py /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/fpm-0.4.22/bin/fpm --python-install-lib /opt/graphite/webapp -s python -t deb graphite-web-0.9.10/setup.py dpkg -i python-carbon_0.9.10_all.deb python-graphite-web_0.9.10_all.deb python-whisper_0.9.10_all.deb

We have graphite app installed. Whisper doesn’t need any configuration.Carbon does, but we can go with the default config files:
cp /opt/graphite/conf/carbon.conf.example /opt/graphite/conf/carbon.conf cp /opt/graphite/conf/storage-schemas.conf.example /opt/graphite/conf/storage-schemas.conf

This storache-schemas.conf stores data every minute for a day. As it’s very likely that we need to store data longer (a month, a year…), my storache-schemas.conf looks like that:
[default_1min_for_1month_15min_for_2years] pattern = .* retentions = 60s:30d,15m:2y
This way data is stored every minute for 30 days, and every 15 minutes for 2 years. This makes each graph data size 1,4MB, something reasonable. You can play with these numbers if you need more time or you want to store less space on disk (it’s pretty intuitive).

After that we need to initialize the database:
cd /opt/graphite/webapp/graphite sudo python manage.py syncdb

And now we could start carbon to begin to collect data, executing:
cd /opt/graphite/ ./bin/carbon-cache.py start

But we also want the service to start with the machine, so we need to add it to init.d. As there is no init file with the application, I downloaded an init.d file for graphite in RedHat, and I did little changes to make it work in Debian:
#!/bin/bash # # Carbon (part of Graphite) # # chkconfig: 3 50 50 # description: Carbon init.d


. /lib/lsb/init-functions

prog=carbon

RETVAL=0
start() {

log_progress_msg "Starting $prog: "
 PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/ /opt/graphite/bin/carbon-cache.py start

status=$?

log_end_msg $status

}
stop() {

log_progress_msg "Stopping $prog: "
 PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/ /opt/graphite/bin/carbon-cache.py stop > /dev/null 2>&1

status=$?

log_end_msg $status

}
# See how we were called.

case "$1" in

start)

start

;;

stop)

stop

;;

status)

PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/ /opt/graphite/bin/carbon-cache.py status

RETVAL=$?

;;

restart)

stop

start

;;

*)

echo $"Usage: $prog {start|stop|restart|status}"

exit 1

esac

exit $RETVAL

To install it we just need to put it where it belongs:
wget http://www.tomas.cat/blog/sites/default/files/carbon.initd -O /etc/init.d/carbon chmod 0755 /etc/init.d/carbon chkconfig --add carbon

Now we can start it from initd (service carbon start or also /etc/init.d/carbon start). Finally, we configure the webapp to access the data. We create an apache virtualhost with this content:
ServerName YOUR_SERVERNAME_HERE DocumentRoot "/opt/graphite/webapp" ErrorLog /opt/graphite/storage/log/webapp/error.log CustomLog /opt/graphite/storage/log/webapp/access.log common


        

        SetHandler python-program

        PythonPath "['/opt/graphite/webapp'] + sys.path"

        PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython

        SetEnv DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE graphite.settings

        PythonDebug Off

        PythonAutoReload Off

                
        Alias /content/ /opt/graphite/webapp/content/

        

                SetHandler None

We add the virtualhost and allow apache user to access whisper data:
wget http://www.tomas.cat/blog/sites/default/files/graphite-vhost.txt -O /etc/apache2/sites-available/graphite a2ensite graphite chown -R www-data:www-data /opt/graphite/storage/ /etc/init.d/apache reload

And that’s it! One last detail… graphite comes with Los Angeles timezone. In order to chang it, we need to set “TIME_ZONE” variable in /opt/graphite/webapp/graphite/local_settings.py file. There is a file with lots of variables in /opt/graphite/webapp/graphite/local_settings.py.example, but as I just need to change the timezone, I run this command:
echo "TIME_ZONE = 'Europe/Madrid'" > /opt/graphite/webapp/graphite/local_settings.py

And with that we have everything. Now we just need to send data to carbon (port 2003) to be stored in whisper si graphite webapp can show it. Have fun!

Bibliography: I’ve followed official documentation http://graphite.wikidot.com/installation and http://graphite.wikidot.com/quickstart-guide, but debian specifics were at http://slacklabs.be/2012/04/05/Installing-graphite-on-debian/