The installer script handles host setup of packages, directories, permissions and other variables required to run Tableau Server. This includes running a collection of Tableau Services Manager (tsm) and the Tableau command-line utility (tabcmd).
In addition to the host, the installer also will install, configure, and start Tableau Server. By default the installer activates a trial license. A valid product key can be set in the script or you can simply activate the product within the server UI.
Note: This is intended for a standalone, single node deployment.
Before you install make sure you have a Linux on a computer (or an AWS instance type) that meets the operating system requirements and the minimum hardware requirements for Tableau Server.
Review the minimum hardware recommendations. The recommendations represent the minimum hardware configuration you should use for a production installation of Tableau Server.
At minimum, a 64-bit Tableau Server requires a 2-core CPU (the equivalent of 4 AWS vCPUs) and 8 GB RAM. However, a total of 8 CPU cores (16 AWS vCPUs) and 64GB RAM are strongly recommended for a single production Amazon EC2 instance.
For development purposes, we have found that 8 AWS vCPUs and 64GB RAM sufficient. We have tested on a t3.2xlarge without incident.
Tableau states that the following are recommended instance types:
c5.4xlargem5.4xlarger5.4xlarge
For more information, check out the docs: https://help.tableau.com/current/server-linux/en-us/server_hardware_min.htm
Tableau suggest you use two volumes: a 30-50 GiB volume for the operating system 100 GiB or larger volume for Tableau Server. For development we typically attach a 75GB EBS volume.
The host OS should be CentOS 7.3 or higher (not 8.x). While comparable to CentOS, there were difficulties getting the automated installer to work out-of-the-box Amazon Linux 2.
For more information on different official AWS AMI options, check out the docs: https://wiki.centos.org/Cloud/AWS
The install process will grab the RPM installer for Tableau Server and the PostgreSQL driver. The PostgreSQL driver is installed because it is required when using the built-in administrative views.
The versions for each are set with variables:
export TABLEAU_SERVER_VERSION=2019-3-0
export POSTGRES_VERSION=09.06.0500-1The installer will connect to Tableau, pull the files locally and then install:
wget https://downloads.tableau.com/tssoftware/tableau-server-$TABLEAU_SERVER_VERSION.x86_64.rpm -O /tmp/tableau-server-$TABLEAU_SERVER_VERSION.x86_64.rpm
wget https://downloads.tableau.com/drivers/linux/yum/tableau-driver/tableau-postgresql-odbc-$POSTGRES_VERSION.x86_64.rpm -O /tmp/tableau-postgresql-odbc-$POSTGRES_VERSION.x86_64.rpm
yum install -y /tmp/tableau-server $TABLEAU_SERVER_VERSION.x86_64.rpm \
/tmp/tableau-postgresql-odbc-$POSTGRES_VERSION.x86_64.rpmThe Tableau Server installer is large, over 1.5 GB. Depending on the network connection, this can take awhile to complete.
In addition to the install packages and drivers, you need to install the driver(s) that align with a downstream data warehouse or data lake. In this case, it would be pre-installing the ODBC driver for Redshift. This is done by setting the Amazon provided version for the REDSHIFT_VERSION variable.
export REDSHIFT_VERSION=1.4.7.1000The Redshift driver docs are here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/redshift/latest/mgmt/install-odbc-driver-linux.html
aws ec2 run-instances --image-id ami-abcd1234 --count 1 --instance-type mX.medium \
--key-name my-key-pair --subnet-id subnet-abcd1234 --security-group-ids sg-abcd1234 \
--user-data file://install.shEdit the reg.json file provides the information needed to register Tableau Server.
{
"city" : "Salem",
"state" : "NH",
"zip" : "03079",
"country" : "USA",
"first_name" : "Jason",
"last_name" : "Smith",
"industry" : "Software",
"eula" : "yes",
"title" : "Software Applications Engineer",
"phone" : "5556875309",
"company" : "Example",
"department" : "Engineering",
"email" : "jsmith@example.com"
}For more information, see Activate and Register Tableau Server here:
This is a basic example of a configuration file for initializing Tableau Server.
{
"configEntities": {
"gatewaySettings": {
"_type": "gatewaySettingsType",
"port": 80,
"firewallOpeningEnabled": true,
"sslRedirectEnabled": true,
"publicHost": "localhost",
"publicPort": 80
},
"identityStore": {
"_type": "identityStoreType",
"type": "local"
}
},
"configKeys": {
"gateway.timeout": "900"
}
}Remember to apply any changes after you set the configuration files, run tsm pending-changes apply to apply the changes from the .json file config.
For a full compliment of configuration options, see these links:
- https://help.tableau.com/current/server-linux/en-gb/config_file_example.htm
- https://help.tableau.com/current/server-linux/en-gb/cli_configuration-set_tsm.htm
There have been reports that if the Host information changes between starts, which can happen on AWS without EIP, you may need to reset the hostname. According to Tableau docs, you would reset this information:
tsm configuration set -k gateway.public.host -v "ec2-XX-XXX-XX-XX.compute-1.amazonaws.com" && tsm pending-changes applyIt is suggested that you enable the Tableau Catalog. Tableau says:
Tableau Catalog discovers and indexes all of the content on your Tableau Online site or Tableau Server, including workbooks, data sources, sheets, and flows. Indexing is used to gather information about the content, or metadata, about the schema and lineage of the content. Then from the metadata, Catalog identifies all of the databases, files, and tables used by the content on your Tableau Online site or Tableau Server.
sudo /opt/tableau/tableau_server/packages/customer-bin.*/tsm maintenance metadata-services enableMore info on the Tableau Data catalog is here: https://help.tableau.com/current/server/en-us/dm_catalog_overview.htm
Views published to Tableau Server can have a live connection to a database. This data gets stored in a cache as users view reports. Subsequent views will pull the data the cache, if it is available. By default, Tableau Server will cache and reuse data for as long as possible. To change the default behavior run this command: tsm data-access caching set -r <value> where <value> is one of these options:
- empty string (
""). This is the default value and indicates that Tableau Server should configure cache and always use cached data when available:tsm data-access caching set -r "" - specifies the maximum number of minutes data should be cached:
tsm data-access caching set -r "600" alwaysor0(zero). These values indicates that Tableau Server should always get the latest data and that the cache should be refreshed each time a page is reloaded:tsm data-access caching set -r "0"ortsm data-access caching set -r "always"
Once you have set your data cache value, do not forget to apply the changes:
tsm pending-changes applyThis is currently experimental. While the process will build, it will fail during a docker run command.
docker build --build-arg "TABLEAU_SERVER_VERSION=2019-3-0" --build-arg "POSTGRES_VERSION=09.06.0500-1" -t tableau .Per Tableau documents, you should mount host locations for the container. This example shows the various -v mounts:
docker run -v /sys/fs/cgroup:/sys/fs/cgroup -v /var/opt/tableau:/var/opt/tableau -v /run:/run -it tableau bash
systemctl statusIn the event you need to wipe the server from a server, you should use the tableau- server-obliterate script provided by Tableau. You can find it in /opt/tableau/tableau_server/packages/scripts.<version>/
When ready, you can run the script like this:
sudo bash -c "/opt/tableau/tableau_server/packages/scripts.20194.19.1105.1444/tableau-
server-obliterate -y -y -y -l"This will wipe everything, so take this action with care.
- Install Redshift drivers as part of the install