Walkthrough prerequisites

We have provided Walkthroughs for you to try NATS (and JetStream) on your own. In order to follow along with the walkthroughs, you could choose one of these options:

  • The nats CLI tool must be installed, and a local NATS server must be installed (or you can use a remote server you have access to).
  • You can use Synadia’s NGS.
  • You could even use the demo server from where you installed NATS. This is accessible via nats://demo.nats.io (this is a NATS connection URL; not a browser URL. You pass it to a NATS client application).

Installing the nats CLI Tool

For MacOS:

  1. brew tap nats-io/nats-tools
  2. brew install nats-io/nats-tools/nats

For Arch Linux:

  1. yay natscli

For other versions of Linux and for Windows:
The .deb or .rpm files and Windows binaries (even for ARM) are available here GitHub Releases.

Installing the NATS server locally (if needed)

If you are going to run a server locally you need to first install it and start it. Alternatively if you already know how to use NATS on a remote server, you only need to pass the server URL to nats using the -s option or preferably create a context using nats context add, to specify the server URL(s) and credentials file containing your user JWT.

Installing the NATS server via a Package Manager

On Mac OS:

  1. brew install nats-server

On Windows:

  1. choco install nats-server

On Arch Linux:

  1. yay nats-server

For other versions of Linux or other architectures, you can install a release build as shown below.

Downloading a Release Build

You can find the latest release of nats-server here.

You could manually download the zip file matching your systems architecture, and unzip it. You could also use curl to download a specific version. The example below shows for example, how to download version 2.6.2 of the nats-server for Linux AMD64: 

  1. curl -L https://github.com/nats-io/nats-server/releases/download/v2.6.5/nats-server-v2.6.5-linux-amd64.zip -o nats-server.zip
  1. unzip nats-server.zip -d nats-server

which should output something like

  1. Archive:  nats-server.zip
  2.    creating: nats-server-v2.6.2-linux-amd64/
  3.   inflating: nats-server-v2.6.2-linux-amd64/README.md
  4.   inflating: nats-server-v2.6.2-linux-amd64/LICENSE
  5.   inflating: nats-server-v2.6.2-linux-amd64/nats-server

and finally, copy it to the bin folder (this allows you to run the executable from anywhere in the system):

  1. sudo cp nats-server/nats-server-v2.6.2-linux-amd64/nats-server /usr/bin

Start the NATS server (if needed)

To start a simple demonstration server locally, simply run:

  1. nats-server

(or nats-server -m 8222 if you want to enable the HTTP monitoring functionality)

When the server starts successfully, you will see the following messages:

  1. [14524] 2021/10/25 22:53:53.525530 [INF] Starting nats-server
  2. [14524] 2021/10/25 22:53:53.525640 [INF]   Version:  2.6.1
  3. [14524] 2021/10/25 22:53:53.525643 [INF]   Git:      [not set]
  4. [14524] 2021/10/25 22:53:53.525647 [INF]   Name:     NDAUZCA4GR3FPBX4IFLBS4VLAETC5Y4PJQCF6APTYXXUZ3KAPBYXLACC
  5. [14524] 2021/10/25 22:53:53.525650 [INF]   ID:       NDAUZCA4GR3FPBX4IFLBS4VLAETC5Y4PJQCF6APTYXXUZ3KAPBYXLACC
  6. [14524] 2021/10/25 22:53:53.526392 [INF] Starting http monitor on 0.0.0.0:8222
  7. [14524] 2021/10/25 22:53:53.526445 [INF] Listening for client connections on 0.0.0.0:4222
  8. [14524] 2021/10/25 22:53:53.526684 [INF] Server is ready

The NATS server listens for client connections on TCP Port 4222.