Install Kapacitor

This page provides directions for installing, starting, and configuring Kapacitor.

Requirements

Installation of the InfluxDB package may require root or administrator privileges in order to complete successfully.

Networking

Kapacitor listens on TCP port 9092 for all API and write calls.

Kapacitor may also bind to randomized UDP ports for handling of InfluxDB data via subscriptions.

Installation

Kapacitor has two binaries:

• kapacitor: a CLI program for calling the Kapacitor API.
• kapacitord: the Kapacitor server daemon.

You can download the binaries directly from the downloads page.

Note: Windows support is experimental.

Starting the Kapacitor service

For packaged installations, please see the respective sections below for your operating system. For non-packaged installations (tarballs or from source), you will need to start the Kapacitor application manually by running:

./kapacitord -config <PATH TO CONFIGURATION>

macOS (using Homebrew)

To have launchd start Kapacitor at login:

ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/kapacitor/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents

Then to load Kapacitor now:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.kapacitor.plist

Or, if you don’t want or need launchctl, you can just run:

kapacitord -config /usr/local/etc/kapacitor.conf

Linux - SysV or Upstart systems

To start the Kapacitor service, run:

sudo service kapacitor start

Linux - systemd systems

To start the Kapacitor service, run:

sudo systemctl start kapacitor

Configuration

An example configuration file can be found here.

Kapacitor can also provide an example configuration for you using this command:

kapacitord config

To generate a new configuration file, run:

kapacitord config > kapacitor.generated.conf

Shared secret

If using Kapacitor v1.5.3 or newer and InfluxDB with authentication enabled, set the [http].shared-secret option in your Kapacitor configuration file to the shared secret of your InfluxDB instances.

# ...
[http]
  # ...
  shared-secret = "youramazingsharedsecret"

If not set, set to an empty string, or does not match InfluxDB’s shared-secret, the integration with InfluxDB will fail and Kapacitor will not start.

Time zone

To display alerts notifications using a preferred time zone, either change the time zone of the host on which Kapacitor is running or set the Kapacitor process’ TZ environment variable.

systemd

Add the environment variable using systemctl edit kapacitor:

[Service]
Environment="TZ=Asia/Shanghai"

docker

Set the environment variable using the -e flag when starting the container (-e TZ=Asia/Shanghai) or in your docker-compose.yml.