If you are hosting your Octopus Server yourself, these are the minimum requirements.
Operating system
Octopus Server can be hosted on either:
- A Microsoft Windows operating system
- In a Linux container.
However, once your Octopus Server is up and running, you can deploy to Windows servers, Linux servers, Microsoft Azure, AWS, GCP, Cloud Regions, or even an offline package drop.
Windows Server
Octopus Server can be hosted on Windows Server 2012 R2 or higher. We automatically test Octopus Server on the following versions of Windows Server:
- Windows Server 2012 R2
- Windows Server 2016
- Windows Server 2019
- Windows Server 2022
Octopus Server will run on Windows Server (Core) without the Desktop experience. However, the easiest installation path is to use “Server with Desktop Experience” which has a GUI and supports running our installation wizard. If you want to use Windows Server Core, you will need to add some missing Windows Features and configure the Octopus Server yourself.
Learn about automating installation.
Windows desktop
Octopus Server will run on client/desktop versions of Windows, such as Windows 7 and Windows 10. This can be an easy way to trial Octopus Server; however, we do not support Octopus Server for production workloads unless it is hosted on a server operating system.
Octopus Server in Container
From Octopus 2020.6, we publish linux/amd64 Docker images for each Octopus Server release and they are available on DockerHub.
Requirements for the Octopus Server Linux Container will depend on how you intend to run it. There are some different options to run the Octopus Server Linux Container, which include:
- Octopus Server Container with Docker Compose
- Octopus Server Container with systemd
- Octopus Server Container in Kubernetes
You can also run the Octopus Server Linux Container using a platform such as AWS ECS.
SQL Server Database
Octopus works with a wide range of versions and editions of SQL Server, from a local SQL Server Express instance, all the way to an Enterprise Edition SQL Server Failover Cluster or SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group, or even one of the hosted database-as-a-service offerings.
The following versions of SQL Server Database are supported and automatically tested against every release of Octopus Server:
| Octopus Server | Minimum SQL Server version | Azure SQL |
|---|---|---|
| 2020.2.x ➜ latest | SQL Server 2016+ | Supported |
| 3.0 ➜ 2019.13 | SQL Server 2008+ | Supported |
Supported editions:
- Express (free)
- Web
- Datacenter
- Standard
- Enterprise
- Microsoft Azure SQL Database
- AWS RDS SQL Database
Warning: Octopus does not support database mirroring or SQL Server replication. Having these features turned on may cause errors during configuration. More information.
Hypervisors
Windows Server can be installed on a bare-metal machine or on a virtual machine (VM) hosted by any popular type-1 hypervisor or virtual private server (cloud) technology. Type-2 hypervisors can work for demos and POCs, but because they are typically installed on desktop operating systems, aren’t recommended.
Octopus Deploy works the exact same on both bare-metal machines or VMs. All it sees is it is running on Windows Server. Of our customers who self-host Octopus Deploy, the vast majority of them use VMs.
The list of hypervisors and virtual private servers include (but not limited to):
- Type-1 Hypervisors
- Virtual Private Server (cloud)
- AWS
- Azure
- GCP
- Oracle
- Type-2 Hypervisors
Most, if not all, of those tools include documentation or pre-built images for Windows Server 2012 R2, 2016 and 2019. Please refer to their documentation on how to install and configure a Windows Server VM.
.NET
Octopus Server is a .NET application distributed as a self-contained deployment that has all the components required to run, including the .NET runtime. Older versions of Octopus Server require the .NET Framework:
- Octopus 3.4 to Octopus 2018.4 requires .NET Framework 4.5.1 or newer.
- Octopus 2018.5 and later requires .NET Framework 4.5.2 or newer and WMF/PowerShell 5.0 or newer.
- Octopus 2019.7 and later requires .NET Framework 4.7.2 or newer.
- Octopus 2020.1 and later is a fully self-contained distribution bundling the .NET runtime - no .NET Framework or additional runtime is required.
Windows PowerShell
- Windows PowerShell 2.0. This is automatically installed on 2008 R2.
- Windows PowerShell 3.0 or 4.0 are recommended, both of which are compatible with PowerShell 2.0, but execute against .NET 4.0+.
- Windows PowerShell 5.1 is required to run Azure steps.
Supported browsers
The Octopus Server includes the Octopus Web Portal user interface and we try to keep this as stable as possible:
- Octopus 3.0 to Octopus 3.17 supports all our default browsers and Internet Explorer 9+.
- Octopus 4.0 and later supports all our default browsers, and Internet Explorer 11+ (available on Windows 7 and newer, and Windows Server 2008R2 SP1 and newer).
- Octopus 2020.1 and later only supports our default browsers - Internet Explorer 11 is no longer supported.
Our default supported browsers are:
- Edge
- Chrome
- Firefox
- Safari
Hardware requirements
The size of your Octopus Deploy instance will be dependent on the number of users and concurrent tasks. A task includes (but not limited to):
- Deployments
- Runbook run
- Retention Policies
- Health Checks
- Let’s Encrypt
- Process triggers
- Process subscriptions
- Script console run
- Sync built-in package repository
- Sync community library step-templates
- Tentacle upgrade
- Upgrade calamari
- Active Directory sync
A good starting point is:
- Small teams/companies or customers doing a POC with 5-10 concurrent tasks:
- 1 Octopus Server: 2 Cores / 4 GB of RAM
- SQL Server Express: 2 Cores / 4 GB of RAM or Azure SQL with 25-50 DTUs
- Small-Medium companies or customers doing a pilot with 5-20 concurrent tasks:
- 1-2 Octopus Servers: 2 Cores / 4 GB of RAM each
- SQL Server Standard or Enterprise: 2 Cores / 8 GB of RAM or Azure SQL with 50-100 DTUs
- Large companies doing 20+ concurrent tasks:
- 2+ Octopus Servers: 4 Cores / 8 GB of RAM each
- SQL Server Standard or Enterprise: 4 Cores / 16 GB of RAM or Azure SQL with 200+ DTUs
These suggestions are a baseline. Monitor your Octopus Server and SQL Server performance on all resources including CPU, memory, disk, and network, and increase resources when needed.
If you have a Server or Data Center license you can leverage Octopus High Availability to scale out your Octopus Deploy instance. With that option we recommend adding more nodes with 4 cores / 8 GB of RAM instead of increasing resources on one single node. Scaling vertically will only get you so far, at some point you run into underlying host limitations.
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Page updated on Sunday, January 1, 2023