NATS philosophy is simplicity. Installation is just decompressing a zip file and copying the binary to an appropriate directory; you can also use your favorite package manager. Here's a list of different ways you can install or run NATS:
See also installing the NATS client
The following table indicates the current supported NATS server build combinations for operating systems and architectures.
| Operating System | Architectures | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Darwin (macOS) | amd64, arm64 | Stable |
| Linux | amd64, 386, arm6, arm7, arm64, mips64le, s390x | Stable |
| Windows | amd64, 386, arm6, arm7, arm64 | Stable |
| FreeBSD | amd64 | Stable |
| NetBSD | - | Experimental |
| IBM z/OS | - | Experimental |
Note, not all installation methods below have distributions for all OS and architecture combinations.
The NATS server itself has minimal hardware requirements to support small edge devices, but can take advantage of more resources if available.
CPU should be considered in accepting TLS connections. After a network partition, every disconnected client will attempt to connect to a NATS server in the cluster simultaneously, so CPU on those servers will momentarily spike. When there are many clients this can be mitigated with reconnect jitter settings, and errors can be reduced with longer TLS timeouts, and scaling up cluster sizes.
We highly recommend testing to see if smaller, cheaper machines suffice for your workload - often they do! We suggest starting here and adjusting resources after load testing specific to your environment. When using cloud provider instance types make sure the node has a sufficient NIC to support the required bandwidth for the application needs.
For high throughput use cases, the network interface card (NIC) or the available bandwidth are often the bottleneck, so ensure the hardware or cloud provider instance types are sufficient for your needs.
The tables below outline the minimum number of cores and memory for stable cluster performance with different combinations of publishers, subscribers, and message rates.
Stability is defined as the system avoiding slowdowns or running out of memory.
These tests were conducted inside containers with GOMEMLIMIT set to 90% of the memory allocation, utilizing a 2021-era CPU and SSD for JetStream storage.
Note that these are minimum configurations, and actual production environments may require additional resources.
| Cluster Size | CPU cores | Memory | Subscribers | Publishers | Publish Rate msg/s | Total Message Rate msg/s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 32 MiB | 1 | 100 | 1000 | 100,000 |
| 1 | 1 | 64 MiB | 1 | 1000 | 100 | 100,000 |
| 3 | 1 | 32 MiB | 1 | 1000 | 100 | 100,000 |
| 3 | 1 | 64 MiB | 1 | 1000 | 100 | 100,000 |
This table follows the same pattern, with published messages received by a stream using file storage. For a cluster size of three, the stream uses three replicas. Subscribers rely on a "pull consumer" for fetching messages.
| Cluster Size | CPU cores | Memory | Subscribers | Publishers | Publish Rate msg/s | Total Message Rate msg/s |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | 32 MiB | 1 | 10 | 100 | 1,000 |
| 1 | 1 | 32 MiB | 1 | 100 | 10 | 1,000 |
| 1 | 1 | 64 MiB | 1 | 100 | 100 | 10,000 |
| 1 | 1 | 64 MiB | 1 | 1000 | 10 | 10,000 |
| 3 | 1 | 32 MiB | 1 | 100 | 10 | 1,000 |
| 3 | 1 | 64 MiB | 1 | 100 | 100 | 10,000 |
| 3 | 1 | 64 MiB | 1 | 1000 | 10 | 10,000 |
| 3 | 1 | 256 MiB | 1 | 1000 | 100 | 100,000 |
For production deployment of JetStream, we recommend starting with at least 4 CPU cores and 8 GiB of memory to reduce the risk of resource-related issues.
For recommendations on configuring limits in Kubernetes, see: https://github.com/nats-io/k8s/tree/main/helm/charts/nats#nats-container-resources
The simplest way to get the nats-server binary for your machine is to use the following shell command.
For example, to get the binary for version 2.11.6:
To get the latest released version, use @latest. You can also use @main to get the tip, or use a tag, specific branch, or commit hash after the @.
With Docker, you can install the server easily without scattering binaries and other artifacts on your system. The only pre-requisite is to install docker.
To run NATS on Docker:
More information on containerized NATS is available here.
On Windows, using scoop.sh:
On Mac OS:
Arch Linux:
For Arch users, there is an AUR package that you can install with:
To test your installation (provided the executable is visible to your shell):
Typing nats-server should output something like
You can find the latest release of nats-server on the nats-io/nats-server GitHub releases page.
From the releases page, copy the link to the release archive file of your choice and download it using curl -L.
For example, assuming version X.Y.Z of the server and a Linux AMD64:
and finally:
If you have Go installed, installing the binary is easy:
This mechanism will install a build of the main branch, which almost certainly will not be a released version. If you are a developer and want to play with the latest, this is the easiest way.
To test your installation (provided $GOPATH/bin is in your path) by typing nats-server which should output something like
We use goreleaser to build assets published on GitHub releases.
Our builds are fully reproducible, so with Go installed, one can execute the following commands to build from source:
And to verify SHASUMs against our release: