Getting Started

System Requirements

ClickHouse can run on any Linux, FreeBSD or Mac OS X with x86_64 CPU architecture.

Though pre-built binaries are typically compiled to leverage SSE 4.2 instruction set, so unless otherwise stated usage of CPU that supports it becomes an additional system requirement. Here's the command to check if current CPU has support for SSE 4.2:

$ grep -q sse4_2 /proc/cpuinfo && echo "SSE 4.2 supported" || echo "SSE 4.2 not supported"

Installation

From DEB Packages

Yandex ClickHouse team recommends using official pre-compiled deb packages for Debian or Ubuntu.

To install official packages add the Yandex repository in /etc/apt/sources.list or in a separate /etc/apt/sources.list.d/clickhouse.list file:

deb http://repo.yandex.ru/clickhouse/deb/stable/ main/

If you want to use the most recent version, replace stable with testing (this is not recommended for production environments).

Then run these commands to actually install packages:

sudo apt-get install dirmngr    # optional
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv E0C56BD4    # optional
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install clickhouse-client clickhouse-server

You can also download and install packages manually from here: https://repo.yandex.ru/clickhouse/deb/stable/main/.

From RPM Packages

Yandex does not run ClickHouse on rpm based Linux distributions and rpm packages are not as thoroughly tested. So use them at your own risk, but there are many other companies that do successfully run them in production without any major issues.

For CentOS, RHEL or Fedora there are the following options:

From Docker Image

To run ClickHouse inside Docker follow the guide on Docker Hub. Those images use official deb packages inside.

From Sources

To manually compile ClickHouse, follow the instructions for Linux or Mac OS X.

You can compile packages and install them or use programs without installing packages. Also by building manually you can disable SSE 4.2 requirement or build for AArch64 CPUs.

Client: dbms/programs/clickhouse-client
Server: dbms/programs/clickhouse-server

You'll need to create a data and metadata folders and chown them for the desired user. Their paths can be changed in server config (src/dbms/programs/server/config.xml), by default they are:

/opt/clickhouse/data/default/
/opt/clickhouse/metadata/default/

On Gentoo you can just use emerge clickhouse to install ClickHouse from sources.

Launch

To start the server as a daemon, run:

$ sudo service clickhouse-server start

See the logs in the /var/log/clickhouse-server/ directory.

If the server doesn't start, check the configurations in the file /etc/clickhouse-server/config.xml.

You can also manually launch the server from the console:

$ clickhouse-server --config-file=/etc/clickhouse-server/config.xml

In this case, the log will be printed to the console, which is convenient during development. If the configuration file is in the current directory, you don't need to specify the --config-file parameter. By default, it uses ./config.xml.

ClickHouse supports access restriction settings. They are located in the users.xml file (next to config.xml). By default, access is allowed from anywhere for the default user, without a password. See user/default/networks. For more information, see the section "Configuration Files".

After launching server, you can use the command-line client to connect to it:

$ clickhouse-client

By default it connects to localhost:9000 on behalf of the user default without a password. It can also be used to connect to a remote server using --host argument.

The terminal must use UTF-8 encoding. For more information, see the section "Command-line client".

Example:

$ ./clickhouse-client
ClickHouse client version 0.0.18749.
Connecting to localhost:9000.
Connected to ClickHouse server version 0.0.18749.

:) SELECT 1

SELECT 1

┌─1─┐
│ 1 │
└───┘

1 rows in set. Elapsed: 0.003 sec.

:)

Congratulations, the system works!

To continue experimenting, you can download one of test data sets or go through tutorial.

Original article