---
title: Alternative Felix Install with PyInstaller Bundle
---

These instructions will take you through a first-time install of
Calico's per-host daemon, Felix, using the packaged PyInstaller bundle.
In contrast to the `.rpm` and `.deb` installations, the bundle has
minimal dependencies on distribution-provided packages. This allows it
to be installed on systems where the packaged version of Python would be
too old or where some of its Python dependencies are not available.

> **NOTE**
>
> This install process is most suited to bare-metal-only
> installations where Felix is to be used to control policy for the
> host's interfaces. For OpenStack and containers there are
> additional daemons that need to be installed, which are not
> covered here.
>

However, since the bundle doesn't take part in the distribution's
package management, the dependencies that it does have must be installed
manually.

## Prerequisites

The bundle has the following pre-requisites:

-   For IPv4 support, Linux kernel v2.6.32 is required. We have tested
    against v2.6.32-573+. Note: if you intend to run containers, Docker
    requires kernel >=v3.10. The kernel's version can be checked with
    `uname -a`.
-   For IPv6 support, Linux kernel 3.10+ is required (due to the lack of
    reverse path filtering for IPv6 in older versions).
-   glibc >=v2.13 (we build against Debian Wheezy)
-   [conntrack-tools](http://conntrack-tools.netfilter.org/); in
    particular, the `conntrack` command must be available. We test
    against >=v1.4.1. To check the version, run `conntrack --version`.
-   [iptables](http://www.netfilter.org/projects/iptables/index.html);
    for IPv6 support, the `ip6tables` command must be available. We test
    against >=v1.4.7. To check the version, run `iptables --version`.
-   [ipset](http://ipset.netfilter.org/); we test against >=v6.11. To
    check the version, run `ipset --version`.
-   The conntrack, iptables and ipsets kernel modules must be available
    (or compiled-in).
-   An [etcd](https://github.com/coreos/etcd/releases/) cluster that 
    supports the etcdv2 protocol.  We recommend running the latest 
    stable release of etcd v3.x. To check the version, run 
    `etcd --version`

> **NOTE**
>
> If any of the commands above fail when run with the `--version`
> flag then you have an old version that doesn't support reporting
> its version.
>

## Unpack the bundle

Once you have a system with the prerequisites above, the next step is to
unpack the bundle, which is distributed as a `.tgz`. We recommend
installing the bundle to `/opt/`:

    cd <directory containing downloaded bundle>
    # Then, as root:
    tar -xzf calico-felix.tgz -C /opt/

After unpacking the bundle, you should have a directory
`/opt/calico-felix`, containing a binary
`/opt/calico-felix/calico-felix`.

## Create a start-up script

Felix should be started at boot by your init system and the init system
**must** be configured to restart Felix if it stops. Felix relies on
that behaviour for certain configuration changes.

If your distribution uses systemd, then you could use the following unit
file:

    [Unit]
    Description=Calico Felix agent
    After=syslog.target network.target

    [Service]
    User=root
    ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/mkdir -p /var/run/calico
    ExecStart=/opt/calico-felix/calico-felix
    KillMode=process
    Restart=on-failure
    LimitNOFILE=32000

    [Install]
    WantedBy=multi-user.target

Or, for upstart:

    description "Felix (Calico agent)"
    author "Project Calico Maintainers <maintainers@projectcalico.org>"

    start on stopped rc RUNLEVEL=[2345]
    stop on runlevel [!2345]

    limit nofile 32000 32000

    respawn
    respawn limit 5 10

    chdir /var/run

    pre-start script
      mkdir -p /var/run/calico
      chown root:root /var/run/calico
    end script

    exec /opt/calico-felix/calico-felix

## Configure Felix


Optionally, you can create a file at `/etc/calico/felix.cfg` to
configure Felix. The configuration file as well as other options for
configuring felix (including environment variables) are described in
[this]({{site.baseurl}}/{{page.version}}/usage/configuration) document.

If etcd is not running on the local machine, it's essential to configure
the `EtcdAddr` or `EtcdEndpoints` setting to tell Felix how to reach
etcd.

Felix tries to detect whether IPv6 is available on your platform but
the detection can fail on older (or more unusual) systems.  If Felix
exits soon after startup with `ipset` or `iptables` errors try 
setting the `Ipv6Support` setting to `false`.

## Start Felix

Once you've configured Felix, start it up via your init system.

For systemd, with the above unit file installed, you could run:

    systemctl start calico-felix

For upstart:

    start calico-felix

## Running Felix manually

For debugging, it's sometimes useful to run Felix manually and tell it
to emit its logs to screen. You can do that with the following command:

    FELIX_LOGSEVERITYSCREEN=INFO /opt/calico-felix/calico-felix
