NATS is a connective technology built for the hyper-connected world. It is a single technology that enables applications to securely communicate across any combination of cloud vendors, on-premise, edge, web and mobile, and devices. NATS consists of a family of open source products that are tightly integrated but can be deployed easily and independently. NATS is being used globally by thousands of companies, spanning use-cases including microservices, edge computing, mobile, and IoT.
Deploying a Marketplace App
The Linode Marketplace allows you to easily deploy software on a Compute Instance using the Cloud Manager. See Get Started with Marketplace Apps for complete steps.
- Log in to the Cloud Manager and select the Marketplace link from the left navigation menu. This displays the Linode Create page with the Marketplace tab pre-selected.
- Under the Select App section, select the app you would like to deploy.
- Complete the form by following the steps and advice within the Creating a Compute Instance guide. Depending on the Marketplace App you selected, there may be additional configuration options available. See the Configuration Options section below for compatible distributions, recommended plans, and any additional configuration options available for this Marketplace App.
- Click the Create Linode button. Once the Compute Instance has been provisioned and has fully powered on, wait for the software installation to complete. If the instance is powered off or restarted before this time, the software installation will likely fail.
- To verify that the app has been fully installed, see Get Started with Marketplace Apps > Verify Installation. Once installed, follow the instructions within the Getting Started After Deployment section to access the application and start using it.
To verify that the app has been fully installed, see Get Started with Marketplace Apps > Verify Installation. Once installed, follow the instructions within the Getting Started After Deployment section to access the application and start using it.
Estimated Deployment Time: SimpleX Chat should be fully installed within 5-10 minutes after the Compute Instance has finished provisioning.
Configuration Options
- Supported distributions: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS
- Recommended plan: All plan types and sizes can be used.
NATS Server Options
- NATS Server Name: The name for the NATS server. Default is “Test”.
- Version: NATS server software version. Default is 2.10.1.
- Email address (required): Enter the email address to use for generating the SSL certificates.
- NATS Server Port: NATS server port for clients to connect. Default is 4222.
- NATS Websocket Port: To setup the NATS server Websocket port. Default is 8888.
- NATS MQTT Port: To setup the NATS server MQTT port. Default is 1883.
Limited Sudo User
You can fill out the following fields to automatically create a limited sudo user for your new Compute Instance. This account will be assigned to the sudo group, which provides elevated permissions when running commands with the sudo prefix.
- Limited sudo user: Enter your preferred username for the limited user. No Capital Letters, Spaces, or Special Characters
- SSH public key for the limited user: If you wish to login as the limited user through public key authentication (without entering a password), enter your public key here. See Creating an SSH Key Pair and Configuring Public Key Authentication on a Server for instructions on generating a key pair.
- Disable root access over SSH: To block the root user from logging in over SSH, select Yes (recommended). You can still switch to the root user once logged in, and you can also log in as root through Lish.
Locating Your Sudo Password As Root: if you disable root access for your deployment and do not enter a valid SSH public key, you will need to login as the root user via the Lish console and locate the credentials file found at /root/.credentials to obtain the limited sudo user password.
Custom Domain (Optional)
If you wish to automatically configure a custom domain, you first need to configure your domain to use Linode’s name servers. This is typically accomplished directly through your registrar. See Use Linode’s Name Servers with Your Domain. Once that is finished, you can fill out the following fields for the Marketplace App:
- Linode API Token: If you wish to use the Linode’s DNS Manager to manage DNS records for your custom domain, create a Linode API Personal Access Token on your account with Read/Write access to Domains. If this is provided along with the subdomain and domain fields (outlined below), the installation attempts to create DNS records via the Linode API. See Get an API Access Token. If you do not provide this field, you need to manually configure your DNS records through your DNS provider and point them to the IP address of the new instance.
- Subdomain: The subdomain you wish to use, such as www for
www.example.com. - Domain: The domain name you wish to use, such as example.com.
Warning: do not use a double quotation mark character (") within any of the App-specific configuration fields, including user and database password fields. This special character may cause issues during deployment.
Getting Started after Deployment
Accessing the NATS Monitoring UI
To monitor the NATS messaging system, nats-server provides a lightweight HTTP server on a dedicated monitoring port. The monitoring server provides several endpoints, providing statistics and other information.
Open your web browser and go to the custom domain you specified during deployment or the rDNS domain of your Compute Instance (e.g., 192-0-2-1.ip.linodeusercontent.com). This will take you to the NATS monitoring page. Refer to the Monitoring NATS guide for details on the different endpoints, statistics and other info you have access to.
Accessing the NATS Monitoring UI
By default, this NATS deployment creates 2 users, one named “example” and another system user named “system”. The passwords for these users are generated during the initial install process. To obtain these password, log in to your Compute Instance either through the LISH Console or via SSH, then just read the /root/.credentials file, ie:
cat /root/.credentialsThis file will contain the two credentials needed for those users.
For details, see NATS Authorization.
More Information
For more information, refer to these resources. Note that we can’t confirm the authenticity of externally hosted materials.
The NATS Marketplace App was built for Linode by NATS. For support regarding app deployment, contact Linode Support. For support regarding the tool or software itself, use the information in the sidebar.
