Native installation¶

Setting up native access to EESSI, that is a system-wide deployment that does not require workarounds like using a container, requires the installation and configuration of CernVM-FS.

This requires admin privileges, since you need to install CernVM-FS as an OS package.

The following actions must be taken for a (basic) native installation of EESSI:

Installing CernVM-FS itself, ideally using the OS packages provided by the CernVM-FS project (although installing from source is also possible);
Installing the EESSI configuration for CernVM-FS, which can be done by installing the cvmfs-config-eessi package that we provide for the most popular Linux distributions (more information available here);
Creating a small client configuration file for CernVM-FS (/etc/cvmfs/default.local); see also the CernVM-FS documentation.

The good news is that all of this only requires a handful commands :

RHEL-based Linux distributionsDebian-based Linux distributions

# Installation commands for RHEL-based distros like CentOS, Rocky Linux, Almalinux, Fedora, ...

# install CernVM-FS
sudo yum install -y https://ecsft.cern.ch/dist/cvmfs/cvmfs-release/cvmfs-release-latest.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install -y cvmfs

# install EESSI configuration for CernVM-FS
sudo yum install -y https://github.com/EESSI/filesystem-layer/releases/download/latest/cvmfs-config-eessi-latest.noarch.rpm

# create client configuration file for CernVM-FS (no squid proxy, 10GB local CernVM-FS client cache)
sudo bash -c "echo 'CVMFS_CLIENT_PROFILE="single"' > /etc/cvmfs/default.local"
sudo bash -c "echo 'CVMFS_QUOTA_LIMIT=10000' >> /etc/cvmfs/default.local"

# make sure that EESSI CernVM-FS repository is accessible
sudo cvmfs_config setup

# Installation commands for Debian-based distros like Ubuntu, ...

# install CernVM-FS
sudo apt-get install lsb-release
wget https://ecsft.cern.ch/dist/cvmfs/cvmfs-release/cvmfs-release-latest_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i cvmfs-release-latest_all.deb
rm -f cvmfs-release-latest_all.deb
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y cvmfs

# install EESSI configuration for CernVM-FS
wget https://github.com/EESSI/filesystem-layer/releases/download/latest/cvmfs-config-eessi_latest_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i cvmfs-config-eessi_latest_all.deb

# create client configuration file for CernVM-FS (no squid proxy, 10GB local CernVM-FS client cache)
sudo bash -c "echo 'CVMFS_CLIENT_PROFILE="single"' > /etc/cvmfs/default.local"
sudo bash -c "echo 'CVMFS_QUOTA_LIMIT=10000' >> /etc/cvmfs/default.local"

# make sure that EESSI CernVM-FS repository is accessible
sudo cvmfs_config setup

Note

The commands above only cover the basic installation of EESSI.

This is good enough for an individual client, or for testing purposes, but for a production-quality setup you should also set up a Squid proxy cache.

For large-scale systems, like an HPC cluster, you should also consider setting up your own CernVM-FS Stratum-1 mirror server.

For more details on this, please refer to the Stratum 1 and proxies section of the CernVM-FS tutorial.