Building Influx on Ubuntu 20.04

Editor’s note (2026): This is significantly out of date — InfluxDB is now on the 3.x line, the install method below (apt-key, the “bionic” repo) is deprecated and won’t work on modern Ubuntu, and InfluxDB 1.x is no longer the current major version. Check the current InfluxData install docs before following this. Leaving the original steps below for historical reference.

Some quick notes on how to build Influx on Ubuntu. I’ve built a couple of instances of influx in the past for specific projects, usually without any other elements of the TICK stack.

Update the system:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Get and install repository for Influx.

curl -sL https://repos.influxdata.com/influxdb.key | sudo apt-key add -
echo "deb https://repos.influxdata.com/ubuntu bionic stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/influxdb.list

Update repository

apt-get update

Install Influxdb

apt-get install influxdb

Start up influx and enable it as a service

systemctl start influxdb
systemctl enable influxdb

Check the status

systemctl status influxdb

Uncomment the following line in order to allow influx to listen.

vim /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf

[http]
  # Determines whether HTTP endpoint is enabled.
  enabled = true

Install the influx cli client

sudo apt-get install influxdb-client

Next in this series will be authentication and authorization.