TPA installation v23

To use TPA, you need to install tpaexec and run the tpaexec setup command. This document explains how to install TPA packages.

TPA packages are available to prospects (for a 60 day trial), EDB customers with a valid Extreme HA subscription, or by prior arrangement. Please contact your account manager to request access.

We publish TPA packages for Debian 10 (buster), Ubuntu 22.04 (jammy), Ubuntu 20.04 (focal), Ubuntu 18.04 (bionic), RHEL/CentOS 7.x and 8.x, Rocky 8.x and AlmaLinux 8.x. These distributions provide a usable Python 3.6+ environment out of the box, which TPA requires. However, TPA supports a wider range of distributions on target instances.

Quickstart

Login to EDB Repos 2.0 to obtain your token. Then execute the following command, substituting your token for <your-token>.

# Add repository (Debian, Ubuntu)
$ curl -1sLf 'https://downloads.enterprisedb.com/<your-token>/postgres_distributed/setup.deb.sh' | sudo -E bash

# Add repository (RedHat, Rocky or AlmaLinux)
$ curl -1sLf 'https://downloads.enterprisedb.com/<your-token>/postgres_distributed/setup.rpm.sh' | sudo -E bash

Then run the following commands:

# Install packages (Debian, Ubuntu)
$ sudo apt-get install tpaexec

# Install packages (RedHat, Rocky or AlmaLinux)
$ sudo yum install tpaexec

# Install additional dependencies
$ sudo /opt/EDB/TPA/bin/tpaexec setup

# Verify installation (run as a normal user)
$ /opt/EDB/TPA/bin/tpaexec selftest

More detailed explanations are given below.

What time is it?

Please make absolutely sure that your system has the correct date and time set, because various things will fail otherwise. For example:

$ sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org

Packages

To install TPA, you must first subscribe to an EDB repository that provides it. The preferred source for repositories is EDB Repos 2.0.

Login to EDB Repos 2.0 to obtain your token. Then execute the following command, substituting your token for <your-token>.

# Debian or Ubuntu
$ curl -1sLf 'https://downloads.enterprisedb.com/<your-token>/postgres_distributed/setup.deb.sh' | sudo -E bash

# RedHat, Rocky or AlmaLinux
$ curl -1sLf 'https://downloads.enterprisedb.com/<your-token>/postgres_distributed/setup.rpm.sh' | sudo -E bash
Troubleshooting older tokens

If the command above fails with "Access denied", you may have an access token that was generated before February 20th, 2023 and lacks access to this repository. Contact support to gain access.

Alternatively, you may obtain TPA from the legacy 2ndQuadrant repository. To do so, login to the EDB Customer Support Portal and subscribe to the "products/tpa/release" repository by adding a subscription under Support/Software/Subscriptions, and following the instructions to enable the repository on your system.

Once you have enabled one of these repositories, you may install TPA as follows:

# Debian or Ubuntu
$ sudo apt-get install tpaexec

# RedHat, Rocky or AlmaLinux
$ sudo yum install tpaexec

This will install TPA into /opt/EDB/TPA. It will also ensure that other required packages (e.g., Python 3.6 or later) are installed.

We mention sudo here only to indicate which commands need root privileges. You may use any other means to run the commands as root.

Python environment

Next, run tpaexec setup to create an isolated Python environment and install the correct versions of all required modules.

$ sudo /opt/EDB/TPA/bin/tpaexec setup

You must run this as root because it writes to /opt/EDB/TPA, but the process will not affect any system-wide Python modules you may have installed (including Ansible).

Add /opt/EDB/TPA/bin to the PATH of the user who will normally run tpaexec commands. For example, you could add this to your .bashrc or equivalent shell configuration file:

$ export PATH=$PATH:/opt/EDB/TPA/bin

Installing without network access

When you run tpaexec setup, it will ordinarily download the Python packages from the network. The tpaexec-deps package (available from the same repository as tpaexec) bundles everything that would have been downloaded, so that they can be installed without network access. Just install the package before you run tpaexec setup and the bundled copies will be used automatically.

Verification

Once you're done with all of the above steps, run the following command to verify your local installation:

$ tpaexec selftest

If that command completes without any errors, your TPA installation is ready for use.

Upgrading

To upgrade to a later release of TPA, you must:

  1. Install the latest tpaexec package
  2. Install the latest tpaexec-deps package (if required; see above)
  3. Run tpaexec setup again

If you have subscribed to the TPA package repository as described above, running apt-get update && apt-get upgrade or yum update should install the latest available versions of these packages. If not, you can install the packages by any means available.

We recommend that you run tpaexec setup again whenever a new version of tpaexec is installed. Some new releases may not strictly require this, but others will not work without it.

Ansible community support

TPA now supports ansible community, you may choose to use it by using --use-community-ansible option during tpaexec setup, default will be to use the legacy 2ndQuadrant/ansible fork. This will change in a future release, support for 2ndQuadrant/ansible will be dropped and community ansible will become the new default.

notable difference:

  • change the --skip-flags options to community behavior where a task will be skipped if part of the list given to the --skip-tags option even if it is also tagged with special tag always. TPA expects all tasks tagged with always to be run to ensure a complete deployment, therefor --skip-tags should not be used when using community ansible.