Install Serf

Serf must first be installed on every node that will be a member of a Serf cluster. To make installation easy, Serf is distributed as a binary package for all supported platforms and architectures. This page will not cover how to compile Serf from source.

Installing Serf

To install Serf, find the appropriate package for your system and download it. Serf is packaged as a "zip" archive.

After downloading Serf, unzip the package. Copy the serf binary to somewhere on the PATH so that it can be executed. On Unix systems, ~/bin and /usr/local/bin are common installation directories, depending on if you want to restrict the install to a single user or expose it to the entire system. On Windows systems, you can put it wherever you would like.

Verifying the Installation

After installing Serf, verify the installation worked by opening a new terminal session and checking that serf is available. By executing serf you should see help output similar to that below:

$ serf
usage: serf [--version] [--help] <command> [<args>]

Available commands are:
    agent      Runs a Serf agent
    event      Send a custom event through the Serf cluster
    join       Tell Serf agent to join cluster
    members    Lists the members of a Serf cluster
    monitor    Stream logs from a Serf agent
    version    Prints the Serf version

If you get an error that serf could not be found, then your PATH environmental variable was not setup properly. Please go back and ensure that your PATH variable contains the directory where Serf was installed.

Otherwise, Serf is installed and ready to go!