Quick Start

Let's start your Garage journey! In this chapter, we explain how to deploy Garage as a single-node server and how to interact with it.

Our goal is to introduce you to Garage's workflows. Following this guide is recommended before moving on to configuring a multi-node cluster.

Note that this kind of deployment should not be used in production, as it provides no redundancy for your data!

Get a binary

Download the latest Garage binary from the release pages on our repository:

https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/_releases.html

Place this binary somewhere in your $PATH so that you can invoke the garage command directly (for instance you can copy the binary in /usr/local/bin or in ~/.local/bin).

If a binary of the last version is not available for your architecture, or if you want a build customized for your system, you can build Garage from source.

Writing a first configuration file

This first configuration file should allow you to get started easily with the simplest possible Garage deployment. Save it as /etc/garage.toml. You can also store it somewhere else, but you will have to specify -c path/to/garage.toml at each invocation of the garage binary (for example: garage -c ./garage.toml server, garage -c ./garage.toml status).

metadata_dir = "/tmp/meta"
data_dir = "/tmp/data"

replication_mode = "none"

rpc_bind_addr = "[::]:3901"
rpc_public_addr = "127.0.0.1:3901"
rpc_secret = "1799bccfd7411eddcf9ebd316bc1f5287ad12a68094e1c6ac6abde7e6feae1ec"

bootstrap_peers = []

[s3_api]
s3_region = "garage"
api_bind_addr = "[::]:3900"
root_domain = ".s3.garage"

[s3_web]
bind_addr = "[::]:3902"
root_domain = ".web.garage"
index = "index.html"

The rpc_secret value provided above is just an example. It will work, but in order to secure your cluster you will need to use another one. You can generate such a value with openssl rand -hex 32.

As you can see in the metadata_dir and data_dir parameters, we are saving Garage's data in /tmp which gets erased when your system reboots. This means that data stored on this Garage server will not be persistent. Change these to locations on your local disk if you want your data to be persisted properly.

Launching the Garage server

Use the following command to launch the Garage server with our configuration file:

RUST_LOG=garage=info garage server

You can tune Garage's verbosity as follows (from less verbose to more verbose):

RUST_LOG=garage=info garage server
RUST_LOG=garage=debug garage server
RUST_LOG=garage=trace garage server

Log level info is recommended for most use cases. Log level debug can help you check why your S3 API calls are not working.

Checking that Garage runs correctly

The garage utility is also used as a CLI tool to configure your Garage deployment. It uses values from the TOML configuration file to find the Garage daemon running on the local node, therefore if your configuration file is not at /etc/garage.toml you will again have to specify -c path/to/garage.toml.

If the garage CLI is able to correctly detect the parameters of your local Garage node, the following command should be enough to show the status of your cluster:

garage status

This should show something like this:

==== HEALTHY NODES ====
ID                 Hostname  Address         Tag                   Zone  Capacity
563e1ac825ee3323…  linuxbox  127.0.0.1:3901  NO ROLE ASSIGNED

Creating a cluster layout

Creating a cluster layout for a Garage deployment means informing Garage of the disk space available on each node of the cluster as well as the zone (e.g. datacenter) each machine is located in.

For our test deployment, we are using only one node. The way in which we configure it does not matter, you can simply write:

garage layout assign -z dc1 -c 1 <node_id>

where <node_id> corresponds to the identifier of the node shown by garage status (first column). You can enter simply a prefix of that identifier. For instance here you could write just garage layout assign -z dc1 -c 1 563e.

The layout then has to be applied to the cluster, using:

garage layout apply

Creating buckets and keys

In this section, we will suppose that we want to create a bucket named nextcloud-bucket that will be accessed through a key named nextcloud-app-key.

Don't forget that help command and --help subcommands can help you anywhere, the CLI tool is self-documented! Two examples:

garage help
garage bucket allow --help

Create a bucket

Let's take an example where we want to deploy NextCloud using Garage as the main data storage.

First, create a bucket with the following command:

garage bucket create nextcloud-bucket

Check that everything went well:

garage bucket list
garage bucket info nextcloud-bucket

Create an API key

The nextcloud-bucket bucket now exists on the Garage server, however it cannot be accessed until we add an API key with the proper access rights.

Note that API keys are independent of buckets: one key can access multiple buckets, multiple keys can access one bucket.

Create an API key using the following command:

garage key new --name nextcloud-app-key

The output should look as follows:

Key name: nextcloud-app-key
Key ID: GK3515373e4c851ebaad366558
Secret key: 7d37d093435a41f2aab8f13c19ba067d9776c90215f56614adad6ece597dbb34
Authorized buckets:

Check that everything works as intended:

garage key list
garage key info nextcloud-app-key

Allow a key to access a bucket

Now that we have a bucket and a key, we need to give permissions to the key on the bucket:

garage bucket allow \
  --read \
  --write \
  nextcloud-bucket \
  --key nextcloud-app-key

You can check at any time the allowed keys on your bucket with:

garage bucket info nextcloud-bucket

Uploading and downlading from Garage

We recommend the use of MinIO Client to interact with Garage files (mc). Instructions to install it and use it are provided on the MinIO website. Before reading the following, you need a working mc command on your path.

Note that on certain Linux distributions such as Arch Linux, the Minio client binary is called mcli instead of mc (to avoid name clashes with the Midnight Commander).

Configure `mc`

You need your access key and secret key created above. We will assume you are invoking mc on the same machine as the Garage server, your S3 API endpoint is therefore http://127.0.0.1:3900. For this whole configuration, you must set an alias name: we chose my-garage, that you will used for all commands.

Adapt the following command accordingly and run it:

mc alias set \
  my-garage \
  http://127.0.0.1:3900 \
  <access key> \
  <secret key> \
  --api S3v4

You must also add an environment variable to your configuration to inform MinIO of our region (garage by default, corresponding to the s3_region parameter in the configuration file). The best way is to add the following snippet to your $HOME/.bash_profile or $HOME/.bashrc file:

export MC_REGION=garage

Use `mc`

You can not list buckets from mc currently.

But the following commands and many more should work:

mc cp image.png my-garage/nextcloud-bucket
mc cp my-garage/nextcloud-bucket/image.png .
mc ls my-garage/nextcloud-bucket
mc mirror localdir/ my-garage/another-bucket

Other tools for interacting with Garage

The following tools can also be used to send and recieve files from/to Garage:

Refer to the "Integrations" section to learn how to configure application and command line utilities to integrate with Garage.

Garage Documentation