MusicBrainz Server/Setup
Products > Server > Server development > Server setup
Installation instructions
- If you are a MusicBrainz developer working on the next server release use /trunk/INSTALL.
- For everyone else use the latest stable release, /branches/RELEASE_20090524-BRANCH/INSTALL.
- If you just want a running database (no website frontend) see the database setup guide instead.
- Additionally, if you want to setup your own search server instead of having to query
search.musicbrainz.org, there is a README for that.
An alternate option is to install a virtual MusicBrainz server. The virtual image comes fully configured with a Linux environment and the latest stable release of the mb_server source code.
The requirements may look daunting, but please don't let this discourage you; the INSTALL/README files are thorough and contain a lot of information, and we are willing to provide assistance. If you have questions about installing, join us in the #musicbrainz IRC channel or post a question on the developers mailing list and we will attempt to help you out.
We recommend that you dive in and give it a try - who knows how far you'll get and what you might learn along the way!
Requirements
In order to set up a running MusicBrainz server with the full database you will need:
- A linux box, preferably Ubuntu, that is a PIII-700 or better with 256MB RAM.
- 8GB of free disk space, (if you are a developer and only want the server code and database structure 2GB is more than enough).
- Subversion knowledge which will enable you to check out the source code.
As a developer the following knowledge/skills are beneficial:
- Apache, Perl, mod_perl, PostgreSQL and a number of perl modules.
- How to compile and install packages from source on a Linux box.
- How to patch existing packages, although we can help you out if you have questions about that.
Note: The server has never been ported to Windows, and we suspect that it would be a fair amount of work to make that happen.
