Introduction

Etcd is a widely used distributed key value store. As the powerhouse behind many cloud environments such as Kubernetes, Amazon AWS and OpenStack, it is a must have tool to become familiar with. In the following post, we go through downloading and installing etcd 3.3 from github, onto Ubuntu 18.04.

Firstly, download, extract and copy the etcd binaries to the /usr/local/bin folder. Then, create the relevant configuration (etc/etcd) and var (/var/lib/etcd) folders:

wget https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd/releases/download/v3.3.12/etcd-v3.3.12-linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar xvf etcd-v3.3.12-linux-amd64.tar.gz
cd etcd-v3.3.12-linux-amd64
sudo mv etcd etcdctl /usr/local/bin
sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/etcd/
sudo mkdir /etc/etcd

Create the systemd service file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/etcd.service

paste the following:

[Unit]
Description=etcd key-value store
Documentation=https://github.com/etcd-io/etcd
After=network.target

[Service]
User=etcd
Type=notify
Environment=ETCD_DATA_DIR=/var/lib/etcd
Environment=ETCD_NAME=%m
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/etcd
Restart=always
RestartSec=10s
LimitNOFILE=40000

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

And then reload, enable and start the etcd systemd service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now etcd
sudo systemctl enable --now etcd