Installing from released PIP packages

If the templates included in release server debs are not compatible with the platform you would like to run them on, you have the option of installing GRR from PIP on your target platform, then building your own.

First, install the prerequisites:

  • Ubuntu:

apt install -y debhelper dpkg-dev python-dev python-pip rpm zip
  • Centos:

yum install -y epel-release python-devel wget which libffi-devel \
  openssl-devel zip git gcc gcc-c++ redhat-rpm-config

yum install -y python-pip

Next, upgrade pip and install virtualenv:

sudo pip install --upgrade pip virtualenv

Next, create a virtualenv and install the GRR client-builder package:

virtualenv GRR_ENV

source GRR_ENV/bin/activate

pip install grr-response-client-builder

Once that is done, you can build a template for your platform with:

grr_client_build build --output mytemplates

and repack it with:

grr_client_build repack --template mytemplates/*.zip --output_dir mytemplates

If you would like to experiment with GRR’s server components, you will need to first install the grr-response-server pip package. Administrative commands such as as grr_server and grr_config_updater will be added to the virtualenv. You can then launch the server components as follows:

# To run fleetspeak server.
grr_server --component fleetspeak_server --verbose
# To run AdminUI.
grr_server --component admin_ui --verbose
# To run the worker.
grr_server --component worker --verbose
# To run the frontend.
grr_server --component frontend --verbose

Note that GRR requires Python 3.6+, so for platforms with older default Python versions (e.g Centos 6), you need to build a newer version of Python from source and use that for creating the virtualenv.