Download the latest official release from https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs/releases.

Decompress the downloaded file. You will only find one executable file, either "weed" on most systems or "weed.exe" on windows.

Put the file "weed" to all related computers, in any folder you want. Use

./weed -h # to check available options

./weed master -h # to check available options

If no replication is required, this will be enough. The "mdir" option is to configure a folder where the maximum of generated volume id are saved.

./weed master -mdir="."
./weed master -mdir="." -ip=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx # usually set the ip instead the default "localhost"

./weed volume -h # to check available options

Usually volume servers are spread on different computers. They can have different disk space, or even different operating system.

Usually you would need to specify the available disk space, the Weed Master location, and the storage folder.

./weed volume -max=100 -mserver="localhost:9333" -dir="./data"

If you are using a custom gRPC port for master, the address format for mserver is <host>:<port>.<grpcPort>. By default the gRPC port is port + 10000.

Actually, forget about previous commands. You can setup one master server and one volume server in one shot:

./weed server -dir="./data"
# same, just specifying the default values
# use "weed server -h" to find out more
./weed server -master.port=9333 -volume.port=8080 -dir="./data"

With the master and volume server up, now what? Let's pump in a lot of files into the system!

./weed upload -dir="/some/big/folder"

This command would recursively upload all files. Or you can specify what files you want to include.

./weed upload -dir="/some/big/folder" -include=*.txt

Then, you can simply check "du -m -s /some/big/folder" to see the actual disk usage by OS, and compare it with the file size under "/data". Usually if you are uploading a lot of textual files, the consumed disk size would be much smaller since textual files are gzipped automatically.

Now you can use your tools to hit SeaweedFS as hard as you can.

Use with docker is easy as run locally, you can pass all args like above. But you don't need to worry about "-ip". It'll be treated by the entrypoint script.

docker run -p 9333:9333 --name master chrislusf/seaweedfs master -ip=master

docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 18080:18080 --name volume --link master chrislusf/seaweedfs volume -max=5 -mserver="master:9333" -port=8080

But with Compose it's easiest. To startup just run:

docker compose -f docker/seaweedfs-compose.yml -p seaweedfs up

You can use image "chrislusf/seaweedfs" or build your own with dockerfile in the root of repo.

docker run --name weed chrislusf/seaweedfs server

And in another terminal

IP=$(docker inspect --format '{{ .NetworkSettings.IPAddress }}' weed)
curl "http://$IP:9333/cluster/status?pretty=y"	
{
  "IsLeader": true,
  "Leader": "localhost:9333"
}
# use $IP as host for api queries

Make a local copy of seaweedfs from github

git clone https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs.git

Minimal Image (~19.6 MB)

docker build --no-cache -t 'chrislusf/seaweedfs' .

Go-Build Docker Image (~764 MB)

mv Dockerfile Dockerfile.minimal
mv Dockerfile.go_build Dockerfile
docker build --no-cache -t 'chrislusf/seaweedfs' .

You can use docker volumes to persist data:

# start our weed server daemonized
docker run --name weed -d -p 9333:9333 -p 8080:8080 -p 18080:8080 \
  -v seaweedvolume:/data chrislusf/seaweedfs server -dir="/data"

Alternatively, you can mount a directory on the host machine into the container:

# start our weed server daemonized
docker run --name weed -d -p 9333:9333 -p 8080:8080 -p 18080:8080 \
  -v /opt/weedfs/data:/data chrislusf/seaweedfs server -dir="/data"

Note that according to Docker's documentation, volumes are the preferred mechanism for persisting data.

Now our SeaweedFS server will be persistent and accessible by localhost:9333, :8080 and :18080 on host machine. Dont forget to specify "-publicIp" for correct connectivity.

Using SeaweedFS in kubernetes(k8s)