Requirements

Cells ships as a set of precompiled static binaries, one for each operating system. The only required dependency is a MySQL database.

Hardware/OS

• CPU: AMD 64 bits, ARM 32 or 64 bits. 2 core or more are recommended.
• RAM: 4GB RAM
• Disk: SSD is highly recommended for storage.
• Supported OS:
  • Debian Like: Debian 12 (Bookworm), Debian 11 (Bullseye), 10 (Buster); Raspbian 10, 11 or 12; Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish), 20.04 (Focal Fossa), 18.04 (Bionic Beaver)
  • RHEL: RHEL 7, 8 or 9, RockyLinux 8 or 9, CentOS 7
  • MacOSX: from 10.13
  • Windows: 10 or 11 (Cells Home only)

Important Settings

• Dedicated OS user: never run Cells as "root" user!
• Ulimit: the number of allowed open files must be greater than 2048. For production use, a minimum of 8192 is recommended (see ulimit -n).

MySQL/Maria DB versions

Supported server versions:

• MariaDB version 10.3 and above
• MySQL version 5.7 and above (except 8.0.22 that has a bug preventing cells to run correctly)

Creating a database and a privileged user

CREATE USER 'pydio'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '<your-password-here>';
CREATE DATABASE cells DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_bin;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON cells.* to 'pydio'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Important Settings

Always ensure that the database is created with character set and collation set to UTF8.

Make sure not to leave the max_connections to its default value (151) for production we advise at least 500, for a better understanding see MySQL manual.

This can generally be done with a similar instruction :

mysql -u root
SET GLOBAL max_connections = 1000;
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE "max_connections";

SET GLOBAL max_prepared_stmt_count = 131056;
SHOW VARIABLES LIKE "max_prepared_stmt_count";

[Optional] Mongo DB

Depending on your target deployment size, you may switch directly from the default on-file storage used by specific services (search engine, activity feeds, logs, amongst others) to a Mongo DB document store.

This is a good idea if

• You foresee a high load on the platform: number of users and/or a high number of files managed every day.
• You plan to deploy Cells in a distributed environment (cluster) to provide high availability or horizontal scaling.

If you do not have a Mongo DB available yet, you can add it later as Cells provides the tools to migrate from on-file storage to Mongo. Otherwise, prepare Mongo connection information such as :

Supported Mongo Versions: MongoDB has currently been tested with v5, v6 and v7.

Learn more about the reasons to provide a MongoDB here.

Network requirements

Gateway

Cells provides its own webserver as a unified Gateway to public-facing services. As such, unlike old versions of Pydio, you do not need Apache or equivalent.

The Gateway will "bind" to a TCP Port like a standard web server. The port number used is defined in the ./cells configure sites command, or directly as a parameter of the start command in the command line interface.

This is the port that needs to be opened in your firewall to make Cells accessible outside the server.

Services

Cells uses TCP/IP connections to communicate between services. The following are using pre-defined ports, that can be overridden in all commands that refer to services in the command line interface (eg start, admin, ...).

Other requirements

The date & time on the server must be correct, otherwise you will have authentication problems; e.g: 403 access forbidden errors when trying to upload.

If you plan to use one of the clients (e.g.: Cells Sync, the mobile apps, Cells clients), you must also at least define the public external URL. Otherwise, Cells cannot complete the OAuth credential flow.