Deployment Walkthrough

This page is meant as an overview of setting up a VOLTTRON deployment which consists of one or more platforms collecting data and being managed by another platform running the VOLTTRON Central agent. High level instructions are included but for more details on each step, please follow links to that section of the wiki.

Notes/Tips:

• Aside from installing the required packages with apt-get, sudo is not required and should not be used. VOLTTRON is designed to be run as a non-root user and running with sudo is not supported.
• The convenience scripts have been developed to simplify many of the of the repetitive multi-step processes. For instance, scripts/core/make-listener can be modified for any agent and make it one command to stop, remove, build, install, configure, tag, start, and (optionally) enable an agent for autostart.
• These instructions assume default directories are used (for instance, /home/<user>/volttron for the project directory and /home/<user>/.volttron for the VOLTTRON Home directory.
• Creating a separate config directory for agent configuration files used in the deployment can prevent them from being committed back to the repository.
• Double check firewall rules/policies when setting up a multi-node deployment to ensure that platforms can communicate

On all machines:

On all machines in the deployment, setup the platform, setup encryption, authentication, and authorization. Also, build the basic agents for the deployment. All platforms will need a PlatformAgent and a Historian. Using scripts will help simplify this project.

Install required packages

• sudo apt-get install build-essential python-dev openssl libssl-dev libevent-dev git

Build the project

• Clone the repository and build using python bootstrap.py

VIP-Authentication - auth.json

Configuring Platform

• To make the platform available for remote platforms, edit or create a config file named config at the VOLTTRON home. By default, this is at: ~/.volttron

  • Add the following:

    [volttron]

    vip-address=tcp://<IP-ADDRESS>:<PORT>

• Run the platform once to create default directories and get the server key: volttron -v 2015-09-28 14:01:25,992 () volttron.platform.main INFO: public key: P3Y0rMT6-dH55xUO0mB2voY54pSzB4sIbN0ZyIjkQ1g

• For exploring VOLTTRON ONLY

  • Turn off encryption and authorization with: --developer-mode

• Turn off encryption only:

  • To disable: truncate ~/.volttron/curve.key to a 0 size file: truncate -s 0 $VOLTTRON_HOME/curve.key

Remaining instructions assume encryption and authorization are on.

• Setup PlatformAgent
  • Copy the platform config file from the PlatformAgent directory into config.
  • Copy the make-listener script and modify it for PlatformAgent

On client platforms

• Setup drivers
  • Create a Master Driver Agent to coordinate drivers for the devices controlled by this platform.
  • For MODBUS devices, create config files and point configuration files.
  • For BACnet devices, create a Proxy Agent for BACnet drivers to communicate through
• Setup a Platform Historian to record data from the drivers. A SQLite based historian is recommended for initial exploration.

edit auth.json to allow VOLTTRON Central to access it Add other clients if you want them to communicate directly with it

On VOLTTRON Central platform

• Setup VOLTTRON Central

• Register Platform

  • VC and target must have each other in auth.json
  • Edit VC config to make externally facing

Troubleshooting:

• Check firewall rules registering VC on VC: ipc://@/home/volttron/.volttron/run/vip.socket Change password by putting pw hash in config file Add remote ip address to config file