Prepare Resources for Serious Deployment

Pigsty runs on nodes, which can be physical machines or virtual machines. This document describes the planning and preparation for deployment.

Node

Pigsty runs on the Linux kernel with x86_64 or aarch64 architecture. A node supplies a bare Linux operating system that you can access through SSH. It can be a physical machine, virtual machine, or container with systemd support. The node must have systemd, sudo, and sshd.

A deployment requires at least 1 node. You can deploy to multiple nodes in one playbook run, or add nodes later. The minimum resources are 1C1G; we recommend at least 1C2G. There is no upper resource limit. Pigsty automatically tunes parameters for the available resources.

Select the node count for your requirements; see Architecture Planning. A single-node deployment with external backups provides recovery protection. For production, we recommend multiple nodes. A working HA deployment requires at least 3 nodes. A 2-node deployment provides Semi-HA.

Disk

Pigsty uses /data as the default data directory. If you have a dedicated data disk, mount it at /data. Use /data1, /data2, and /dataN for additional disks.

To change a data directory, set the applicable parameter:

The native MySQL 8.4 pilot module always uses /var/lib/mysql. It does not currently expose a data-directory parameter.

Filesystem

You can use any supported Linux filesystem for data disks. For production, we recommend xfs.

xfs is a standard Linux filesystem with good performance. Its copy-on-write (CoW) support permits instant cloning of large database clusters. Silo deployments with multiple drives require xfs.

ext4 is another supported choice. It has more data recovery tools but does not support CoW. zfs supplies RAID and snapshots, but adds significant performance overhead and requires separate installation.

Select the filesystem for your requirements. Avoid NFS for database services.

Pigsty expects root:root ownership and 755 permissions on /data. Administrators can assign ownership to directories directly under /data. Each application runs with a dedicated account in its own subdirectory. See FHS for the directory structure.

Network

The default online installation requires outbound Internet access. Offline installation does not require Internet access.

Assign a fixed IPv4 address to each node for internal communication. Pigsty uses this primary address on the main network interface as the unique node identifier. If a single-node deployment has no fixed IP address, use 127.0.0.1.

VIP

Pigsty supports optional Layer 2 virtual IP addresses (L2 VIPs). NODE clusters use keepalived; PGSQL clusters use vip-manager.

To use this feature, assign an L2 VIP address to each node or database cluster. This is usually straightforward on your own hardware. Public cloud networks can make this configuration difficult.

CA

Pigsty creates a self-signed certificate authority (CA) for each deployment. The CA issues the encryption certificates.

You can instead use an existing enterprise CA or self-signed CA to issue the required certificates.

Domain

Pigsty uses the local static domain i.pigsty for the Web UI by default. You can also use the node IP address.

For production, we recommend a domain name to enable HTTPS and encrypted data transfer. Domain names also let multiple services share one port.

For Internet access, use a public DNS provider, such as Cloudflare or AWS Route53. Point the domain to the node’s public IP address. For LAN or office access, use internal DNS with the node’s internal IP address.

For local access, add this entry to /etc/hosts on each computer that accesses the Web UI:

10.10.10.10 i.pigsty    # Replace with your domain and Pigsty node IP

Linux

Pigsty runs on Linux and currently targets 16 platform combinations. These combinations cover eight distribution major versions and two architectures. See the Compatible OS List.

The recommended operating system versions are:

• Rocky Linux 9.8 / 10.2.
• Debian 12.15 / 13.6.
• Ubuntu 22.04.5 / 24.04.4 / 26.04.0.

On macOS or Windows, use a virtual machine or a Docker image with systemd.

We strongly recommend a fresh operating system installation. If the server already runs Nginx, PostgreSQL, or similar services, consider a new node.

Locale

We recommend en_US as the primary operating system language so PostgreSQL writes logs in English. At minimum, make sure that this locale is available.

Some distributions, including Debian, do not always supply en_US by default. Use these commands to enable it:

localedef -i en_US -f UTF-8 en_US.UTF-8
localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.UTF-8

For PostgreSQL 17 and later, we strongly recommend the built-in C.UTF-8 collation as the default. The configuration wizard selects C.UTF-8 when the PostgreSQL version and operating system support it.

Ansible

Pigsty uses Ansible on the administration node to control all managed nodes. See Installing Ansible.

By default, Pigsty installs Ansible on INFRA nodes. These nodes can serve as administration nodes or backup administration nodes. In a single-node deployment, one node has both roles. It is the administration node that runs Ansible and the INFRA node that hosts infrastructure.

Pigsty

Use one of these commands to install the current default Pigsty source:

curl -fsSL https://repo.pigsty.io/get | bash;

curl -fsSL https://repo.pigsty.cc/get | bash;

To install a specific version, supply -s <version>:

curl -fsSL https://repo.pigsty.io/get | bash -s <version>  # Install a specific version (current stable: v4.5.0)

curl -fsSL https://repo.pigsty.cc/get | bash -s <version>  # Install a specific version (current stable: v4.5.0)

To install the latest beta version, use one of these commands:

curl -fsSL https://repo.pigsty.io/beta | bash;

curl -fsSL https://repo.pigsty.cc/beta | bash;

For development, you can clone the repository directly:

git clone https://github.com/pgsty/pigsty.git;
cd pigsty; git checkout <tag>  # Use a released version (current stable tag: v4.5.0)

For an environment without Internet access, obtain the source tarball from GitHub Releases or a Pigsty repository:

wget https://repo.pigsty.io/src/pigsty-v<version>.tgz
wget https://repo.pigsty.cc/src/pigsty-v<version>.tgz