Running a custom build

Once you built a custom version of ArangoDB (seeCompiling), you may want to run it usingexisting data or possibly in isolation from an existing installation.

We assumes that you are in the root directory of the ArangoDB distributionand compiling has successfully finished.

Note that this guide is for Linux only.

Running in isolation

This part shows how to run your custom build with an empty database directory

# create data directory
mkdir /tmp/arangodb
# run
bin/arangod \
    --configuration etc/relative/arangod.conf\
     --database.directory /tmp/arangodb

Running with data

This part shows how to run your custom build with the config and data from a pre-existing stable installation.

ArangoDB’s developers may change the db file format and after running with achanged file format, there may be no way back. Alternatively you can run yourbuild in isolation and dump andrestore the data from thestable to your custom build.

When running like this, you must run the db as the arangod user (the defaultinstalled by the package) in order to have write access to the log, databasedirectory etc. Running as root will likely mess up the file permissions - goodluck fixing that!

# become root first
su
# now switch to arangod and run
su - arangod
bin/arangod --configuration /etc/arangodb/arangod.conf