Installation on Ubuntu

Any questions, problems or suggestions with this guide? Ask a question in our community or contribute the change yourself at https://gitlab.com/baserow/baserow/-/tree/develop/docs .

If you installed Baserow 1.8.2 or earlier using this guide in version 1.8.2 please See the upgrade section at the end of this guide.

This guide will walk you through a production installation of Baserow using Docker on Ubuntu. This document aims to provide a walkthrough for servers running Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS. These instructions have been tested with a clean install of Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS and a user account with root access or the ability to run Docker containers.

Guide

# Ensure your system is upto date
sudo apt update
# Docker Setup
sudo apt install docker
# Your user must be in the Docker group to run docker commands
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
# Refresh the group so you don't need to relog to get docker permissions
newgrp docker 
# Change BASEROW_PUBLIC_URL to your domain name or http://YOUR_SERVERS_IP if you want
# to access Baserow remotely.
# This command will run Baserow with it's data stored in the new baserow_data docker 
# volume.
docker run -e BASEROW_PUBLIC_URL=http://localhost \
--name baserow \
-d \
--restart unless-stopped \
-v baserow_data:/baserow/data \
-p 80:80 \
-p 443:443 \
baserow/baserow:1.30.1
# Watch the logs for Baserow to come available by running:
docker logs baserow

Further information

Please refer to the Install with Docker guide for how to configure and maintain your Docker based Baserow server.

Upgrade from Baserow 1.8.2 or earlier

The Old Install on Ubuntu guide is now deprecated. We are asking any users who wish to run Baserow on Ubuntu to instead install Docker and use our official Docker images to run Baserow. This guide explains how to migrate an existing Baserow Ubuntu install to use our official Docker images.

If you were previously using a separate api.your_baserow_server.com domain this is no longer needed. Baserow will now work on a single domain accessing the api at YOUR_DOMAIN.com/api.

Migration Steps

# === Docker Install ===
#
# Install Docker following the guide at https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu/.
# If you have already installed Docker then please skip this section.
#
# The steps are summarized below but we encourage you to follow the guide itself:
#
sudo apt-get remove docker docker-engine docker.io containerd runc
# Setup docker
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    gnupg \
    lsb-release
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg
echo \
  "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
# Add yourself to the docker group
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
newgrp docker

# Verify Docker install worked you should see:
#
# Unable to find image 'hello-world:latest' locally
# latest: Pulling from library/hello-world
# ...
# Hello from Docker!

docker run hello-world

# === Baserow Upgrade ===
# When you are ready to stop your old Baserow server by running
sudo supervisorctl stop all

# === Extract your secret key ===

# Extract your current SECRET_KEY value from /etc/supervisor/conf.d/baserow.conf
cat /etc/supervisor/conf.d/baserow.conf | sed -nr "s/^\s*SECRET_KEY='(\w+)',/\1/p" > .existing_secret_key

# Check this file just contains your exact secret key by comparing it with 
# /etc/supervisor/conf.d/baserow.conf 
cat .existing_secret_key

# === Configure your Postgres to allow connections from Docker ===

# 1. Find out what version of postgresql is installed by running 
sudo ls /etc/postgresql/ 
# 2. Open /etc/postgresql/YOUR_PSQL_VERSION/main/postgresql.conf for editing as root
# 3. Find the commented out # listen_addresses line.
# 4. Change it to be:
listen_addresses = '*'          # what IP address(es) to listen on;
# 5. Open /etc/postgresql/YOUR_PSQL_VERSION/main/pg_hba.conf for editing as root
# 6. Add the following line to the end which will allow docker containers to connect.
host    all             all             172.17.0.0/16           md5
# 7. Restart postgres to load in the config changes.
sudo systemctl restart postgresql
# 8. Check the logs do not have errors by running
sudo less /var/log/postgresql/postgresql-YOUR_PSQL_VERSION-main.log

# === Launch Baserow ===

# Please change this variable to the password used by the baserow user in your 
# postgresql database.
YOUR_BASEROW_DATABASE_PASSWORD=yourpassword
# Change BASEROW_PUBLIC_URL to your domain name or http://YOUR_SERVERS_IP if you want
# to access Baserow remotely.
# This command will run Baserow so it uses your existing postgresql database and your
# existing user uploaded files in /baserow/media. 
# It will store it's redis database and password, any data related to the automatic 
# HTTPS setup provided by Caddy in the new baserow_data docker volume.
docker run \
  -d \
  --name baserow \
  -e SECRET_KEY_FILE=/baserow/.existing_secret_key \
  -e BASEROW_PUBLIC_URL=http://localhost \
  --add-host host.docker.internal:host-gateway \
  -e DATABASE_HOST=host.docker.internal \
  -e DATABASE_USER=baserow \
  -e DATABASE_PASSWORD=$YOUR_BASEROW_DATABASE_PASSWORD \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  -v $PWD/.existing_secret_key:/baserow/.existing_secret_key \
  -v baserow_data:/baserow/data \
  -v /baserow/media:/baserow/data/media \
  -p 80:80 \
  -p 443:443 \
  baserow/baserow:1.30.1
# Check the logs and wait for Baserow to become available
docker logs baserow

Please refer to the Install with Docker guide in the future and for more information on how to manage your Docker based Baserow install.