arangodb/Documentation/Books/Manual/Deployment/ActiveFailover/UsingTheStarter.md

Using the ArangoDB Starter

This section describes how to start an Active Failover setup the tool Starter (the arangodb binary program).

Local Tests

If you want to start a local Active Failover setup quickly, use the --starter.local option of the Starter. This will start all servers within the context of a single starter process:

arangodb --starter.local --starter.mode=activefailover --starter.data-dir=./localdata

Note: When you restart the Starter, it remembers the original --starter.local flag.

Multiple Machines

If you want to start an Active Failover setup using the Starter, use the --starter.mode=activefailover option of the Starter. A 3 "machine" Agency is started as well as 2 single servers, that perform asynchronous replication and failover:

arangodb --starter.mode=activefailover --server.storage-engine=rocksdb --starter.data-dir=./data --starter.join A,B,C

Run the above command on machine A, B & C.

The Starter will decide on which 2 machines to run a single server instance. To override this decision (only valid while bootstrapping), add a --cluster.start-single=false to the machine where the single server instance should not be started.

Once all the processes started by the Starter are up and running, and joined the Active Failover setup (this may take a while depending on your system), the Starter will inform you where to connect the Active Failover from a Browser, shell or your program.

For a full list of options of the Starter please refer to this section.

Using the ArangoDB Starter in Docker

The Starter can also be used to launch an Active Failover setup based on Docker containers. To do this, you can use the normal Docker arguments, combined with --starter.mode=activefailover:

export IP=<IP of docker host>
docker volume create arangodb
docker run -it --name=adb --rm -p 8528:8528 \
    -v arangodb:/data \
    -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
    arangodb/arangodb-starter \
    --starter.address=$IP \
    --starter.mode=activefailover \
    --starter.join=A,B,C

Run the above command on machine A, B & C.

The Starter will decide on which 2 machines to run a single server instance. To override this decision (only valid while bootstrapping), add a --cluster.start-single=false to the machine where the single server instance should not be started.

If you use an ArangoDB version of 3.4 or above and use the Enterprise Edition Docker image, you have to set the license key in an environment variable by adding this option to the above docker command:

    -e ARANGO_LICENSE_KEY=<thekey>

You can get a free evaluation license key by visiting

 https://www.arangodb.com/download-arangodb-enterprise/

Then replace <thekey> above with the actual license key. The start will then hand on the license key to the Docker containers it launches for ArangoDB.