# Installation

This section provides guides for getting setup with Meltano.

# Free Hosted Meltano Dashboards

In November, we released Meltano as a free hosted product! This eliminates the hosting and installation hassle with a concierge-style setup so you can start building dashboards faster.

Fill out this form to get started with a free hosted Meltano account. We will contact you to schedule a setup time and learn everything we can about your needs.

Get started with your free hosted Meltano dashboard

# Self Hosted Solutions

For instructions on how to setup your own Meltano instance, check out:

• DigitalOcean One-Click Installer
• Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Local Installation

# DigitalOcean Marketplace

DigitalOcean provides a simple container for spinning up a server where Meltano can be deployed to the Cloud. Install the Meltano 1-Click App in the DigitalOcean Marketplace

Please note, at times the Meltano version on DigitalOcean may be slightly behind the current PyPi version.

# Video Walkthrough

# Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Go to Meltano in the DigitalOcean Marketplace

2. Select Create Meltano Droplet

3. If you are not logged in already, you will be asked to login, or create a new DigitalOcean account

4. By default, your droplet will come with the following settings that you can customize if desired

• Image: Meltano
• Plan: Starter - Standard
  • $40/mo (8GB / 4 CPUs, 160 GB / SSD disk, 5 TB transfer)
• Datacenter: A default datacenter region (depending your location)
• Number of Droplets: 1 Droplet
• Backups: Not enabled by default

5. Add authentication to your droplet via SSH

6. Click Create Droplet

Once your Droplet is created, it will have its own IP address displayed in the DigitalOcean user interface.

7. Visit your Meltano instance at port 5000, like so: http://{YOUR_IP_ADDRESS}:5000

Now that you've got your Meltano instance up and running, visit our Getting Started Guide to connect some data sources and start building your data pipelines and dashboards!

# Amazon Web Services (AWS)

In this section, we will be going over how you can deploy a Meltano Docker image to AWS.

# Setting Up Elastic Container Service (ECS)

1. Login to AWS Console
2. Search for ECS and click on the link

1. We will create a new Container definition by clicking on the Configure button in the custom card
2. Fill out the form with the following data:

• Container name: Meltano
• Image: YOUR_DOCKER_IMAGE_URL
  • Examples:
    • docker.io/namespace/image-name:tag
    • registry.gitlab.com/namespace/project/image-name:tag
• Memory Limits (MiB): Soft limit 1024
• Port mappings:
  • 5000/tcp (meltano)
  • 5010/tcp (airflow)

1. Click Update button to finish setting up your container defintion
2. Click Edit next to the Task defintion heading
3. Update the form with the following:

• Task definition name: meltano-run
• Network mode: awsvpc
• Task execution role: ecsTaskExecutionRole
• Compatibilities: FARGATE
• Task memory: 1GB (1024)
• Task CPU: 0.25 vCPU (256)

1. Click Next to move to the next step

# Review service properties

1. Verify that the properties are as follows:

• Service name: meltano-service
• Number of desired tasks: 1
• Security group: Automatically create new
• Load balancer type: None

1. Click Next to move on to the next step

# Configure Your Cluster

The main configuration here is the Cluster name. We provide a suggestion below, but feel free to name it as you wish.

• Cluster name: meltano-cluster
• VPC ID: Automatically create new
• Subnets: Automatically create new

# Review Cluster Configuration

After you click Next, you will have the opportunity to review all of the properties that you set. Once you confirm that the settings are correct, click Create to setup your ECS.

You should now see a page where Amazon prepares the services we configured. There will be spinning icons on the right of each service that will live update as it finished. Once you see everything has setup properly, you're cluster has been successfully deployed!

# Final steps

1. Open the page with your cluster
2. Click on the Tasks tab
3. You should see a task that has a status of RUNNING for Last Status
4. Click on the Task ID link (e.g., 0b35dea-3ca..)
5. Under Network, you can find the URL for your instance under Public IP (e.g., 18.18.134.18)
6. Open a new tab in your browser and visit this new URL on port 5000 (e.g., http://18.18.134.18:5000)

# Configure network access

Once you complete the cluster setup, you should be brought to the detail page for the service. You should be default on a tab called Details with a Network Access section.

1. Navigate to the Details tab
2. Under Network Access, click on the link next to Security Groups (e.g., sg-f0dj093dkjf10)
3. This should open a new tab with your security group
4. Navigate to the Inbound Rules tab on the bottom of the page
5. Click Edit Rules
6. Delete any existing rules
7. Click Add Rule with the following properties:

• Type: Custom TCP Rule
• Protocol: TCP
• Port Range: 5000
• Source: Custom 0.0.0.0/0

1. Click "Add Rule" with the following properties:

• Type: Custom TCP Rule
• Protocol: TCP
• Port Range: 5010
• Source: Custom 0.0.0.0/0

1. Click Save rules

# Local Installation

In this section, we will install Meltano as an application you can access locally from your browser and on the command line. If you prefer to install to Docker, please view the installation instructions here.

# Requirements

Before you install Meltano, make sure you have the following requirements installed and up to date.

# Unix-like environment

Recent versions of Linux and macOS are both fully supported, but Windows is not.

If you'd like to run Meltano on Windows, you can install it inside the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). You may also try installing Meltano on Docker, although Docker on Windows is known to have some idiosyncrasies that might hinder Meltano's ability to function.

# Python 3+

• Python 3.6.1+

To check if you have the correct Python version, open your terminal and use the following commands to check the version:

python --version

If you've installed Python 3, but are not getting the result you expect, you may have installed Python 3 alongside an existing Python 2 installation. In this case, please use python3 and pip3 wherever this guide refers to the python and pip commands.

# pip

pip is a package installer that comes automatically with Python 3+. This is also what we will be using to install Meltano. Here are some commands related to pip that may be of interest:

# Check for current version of pip
# to ensure that it is using the Python3 pip
pip --version

# Update pip
pip install --upgrade pip

# Virtual Environment

Why use a virtual environment?

Your local environment may use a different version of Python or other dependencies that are difficult to manage. The virtual environment provides a "clean" space to work without these issues.

# Recommended Virtual Environment Setup

We suggest you create a directory where you want your virtual environments to be saved (e.g. .venv/). This can be any directory in your environment, but we recommend saving it in your Meltano project to make it easier to keep track of.

Then create a new virtual environment inside that directory:

mkdir .venv
python -m venv .venv/meltano

# Activating Your Virtual Environment

Activate the virtual environment using:

source .venv/meltano/bin/activate

If the virtual environment was activated successfully, you'll see a (meltano) indicator added to your prompt.

# Add to `~/.bashrc`, `~/.zshrc`, etc, depending on the shell you use:
alias meltano!="source $MELTANO_PROJECT_PATH/.venv/meltano/bin/activate"

# Use as follows, after creating a new shell:
meltano!

# Install Meltano

Now that you have your virtual environment set up and running, run the following command to install the Meltano package:

pip install meltano

Once the installation completes, you can check if it was successful by running:

meltano --version

That's it! Meltano is now be available for you to use.

Now that you have successfully installed Meltano and its requirements, you can create your first project.

# Create your first project

To initialize a new project, open your terminal and navigate to the directory that you'd like to store your Meltano projects in.

Next, to create your project, you will use the meltano init command which takes a PROJECT_NAME that is of your own choosing. For this guide, let's create a project called "carbon."

meltano init carbon

This will create a new directory named carbon and initialize Meltano's basic directory structure inside it.

Inside the Meltano project directory, all plugin configuration (which may include tokens and passwords) is stored inside the .meltano directory, which is automatically added to the project's .gitignore file to prevent this potentially sensitive information from accidentally being pushed up to a hosted Git repository.

# Start the application

Now that you've created your first Meltano project, let's change directory to our new project and start Meltano UI:

cd carbon
meltano ui

Meltano is now running and should open a new tab at http://localhost:5000.

You are now ready to add data sources, configure reporting databases, schedule updates and build dashboards!

# Installing on Docker

Docker is an alternative installation option to using a virtual environment to run Meltano. To use these instructions you will need to install Docker onto your computer and have it running when you execute the commands below.

# Using Pre-built Docker Images

We provide the meltano/meltano docker image with Meltano pre-installed and ready to use.

Note: The meltano/meltano docker image is also available in GitLab's registry: registry.gitlab.com

This image contains everything you need to get started with Meltano.

# download or update to the latest version
docker pull meltano/meltano

# look the currently installed version
docker run meltano/meltano --version

# Initialize Your Project

Once you have Docker installed, running, and have pulled the pre-built image you can use Meltano just as you would in our Getting Started Guide. However, the command line syntax is slightly different. For example, let's create a new Meltano project:

docker run -v $(pwd):/projects \
             -w /projects \
             meltano/meltano init YOUR_PROJECT_NAME

Then you can cd into your new project:

cd YOUR_PROJECT_NAME

We can then start the Meltano UI. Since ui is the default command, we can omit it.

docker run -v $(pwd):/project \
             -w /project \
             -p 5000:5000 \
             meltano/meltano

You can now visit http://localhost:5000 to access the Meltano UI.

If you are a Meltano end-user who is not going to be contributing code to our open source repository, you should be able to use Meltano entirely from the UI at this point.

Follow the steps in our Getting Started Guide to get started.

# For Contributors: Example Command Line Syntax for Docker

Here are some example of CLI commands you may need to run if you are working with Meltano as an open source contributor:

# Running the ELT from the Command Line

To run the ELT and extract some data from the tap-carbon-intensity into target-sqlite:

docker run -v $(pwd):/project \
             -w /project \
             meltano/meltano elt tap-carbon-intensity target-sqlite

# Adding a Model from the Command Line

Now that we have data in your database, let's add the corresponding model bundle as the basis of our analysis.

docker run -v $(pwd):/project \
             -w /project \
             meltano/meltano add model model-carbon-intensity-sqlite

# Upgrading Meltano

We release a new version of Meltano every week. To keep tabs on the latest releases, follow along on the Meltano blog, or have a look at our CHANGELOG.

# Using Meltano UI

When an update is available, you will be informed of this automatically through a shiny blue button in the top right corner of Meltano UI:

Clicking this button will show more information and give you the option to install the update right away:

The Meltano UI will refresh automatically once installation is complete.

# Using the command line

If you're not using Meltano UI, you can update Meltano to the latest version by running the following command in your terminal:

meltano upgrade

# Troubleshooting

Are you having installation or deployment problems? We are here to help you. Check out Getting Help on the different ways to get in touch with us.