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Manual Install

As of wash v0.12.0, wash up will install a NATS server and wasmCloud for you, however it's still valuable to keep instructions on installing both manually for a minimal server install.

Install NATS server​

NATS is a powerful, cloud native message broker that aims to provide a universal communications substrate across all kinds of workloads. NATS is such a resilient, fast, small, flexible tool that it is part of the core infrastructure requirements of the wasmCloud host. For information on how to install and start the NATS server, please check the NATS Documentation. Note that we require a version of NATS new enough to contain the embedded JetStream functionality.

Installing NATS is quick and easy. Once it's installed, run it with JetStream enabled (you'll know you did it correctly when you see some sweet terminal ASCII art):

nats-server --jetstream
...
... Starting JetStream
...     _ ___ _____ ___ _____ ___ ___   _   __  __
...  _ | | __|_   _/ __|_   _| _ \ __| /_\ |  \/  |
... | || | _|  | | \__ \ | | |   / _| / _ \| |\/| |
...  \__/|___| |_| |___/ |_| |_|_\___/_/ \_\_|  |_|
...

Install and start the wasmCloud host runtime​

The preferred way to install the wasmCloud host runtime is to download the latest release. Follow the instructions below for your platform to download and extract wasmCloud.

wget https://github.com/wasmCloud/wasmcloud-otp/releases/download/v0.57.0/x86_64-linux.tar.gz
mkdir -p wasmcloud
tar -xvf x86_64-linux.tar.gz -C wasmcloud

After extracting from the tar file, the host is fully installed, and the tar file can be deleted. If you haven't already, run NATS with Jetstream following the instructions above.

There are a variety of ways to run the host that are described in more detail in Running the Host. For now, go ahead and cd wasmcloud to get into the correct directory and then run:

bin/wasmcloud_host foreground

This will start the host with attached logs and can be exited at any time by doing ctrl-c. Now, you're ready to proceed onto Getting started.

Stopping the wasmCloud Host Runtime​

There are a number of ways you can stop the runtime, and the recommendation varies with how you started the host. For details, see the safe shutdown section of the reference guide.