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Getting Started with Bacalhau

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to install and run a job with the Bacalhau client.

Install the Bacalhau Client​

The Bacalhau client is a command-line interface (CLI) that allows you to submit jobs to the Bacalhau network. The Bacalhau client is available for Linux, macOS, and Windows. you can also run Bacalhau in a Docker container.

If you don't already have Docker installed, see the full example for installing and running Bacalhau on Docker.

Install the Bacalhau CLI​

You can install or update the Bacalhau CLI or pull a Docker image by running the following command in a terminal. You may need sudo mode or root password to install the local Bacalhau binary to /usr/local/bin:

tip

Windows users can download the latest release tarball from Github and extract bacalhau.exe to anywhere on the PATH.

curl -sL https://get.bacalhau.org/install.sh | bash

See the full example for installing and running bacalhau on Docker.

info

The "latest" tag signifies a specific Bacalhau release or Docker image. If your machine has an older "latest" version, it won't re-download. To run a particular version, use: docker run -it ghcr.io/bacalhau-project/bacalhau:v0.3.23 (for version 0.3.23).

Verify the Installation​

To run and Bacalhau client command with Docker, prefix it with docker run ghcr.io/bacalhau-project/bacalhau:latest.

To verify installation and check the version of the client and server, use the version command, you can run the command:

bacalhau version

If you're wondering which server is being used, the Bacalhau Project has a public Bacalhau server network that's shared with the community. This server allows you to launch your jobs from your computer without maintaining a compute cluster on your own.

Going further, we will look at some commands to run a simple job. For a complete overview of the bacalhau commands, take a look at the CLI Reference page.

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If you want to pass files between the Docker Bacalhau CLI and your desktop, don't forget to mount a volume. You can see an example of this in the Bacalhau Docker example.

Let's submit a "Hello World" Job​

The easiest way to submit a job is using the bacalhau docker run command. Let's take a quick look at its syntax:

bacalhau docker run [FLAGS] IMAGE[:TAG] [COMMAND]

To run our Hello world job, the command below submits a job that runs an echo program within an Ubuntu container:

$ bacalhau docker run ubuntu echo Hello World
info

While this command is designed to resemble Docker's run command which you may be familiar with, Bacalhau introduces a whole new set of flags (see CLI Reference) to support its computing model.

After the above command is run, the job is submitted to the public network, which processes the job and Bacalhau prints out the related job id:

Job successfully submitted. Job ID: 3b39baee-5714-4f17-aa71-1f5824665ad6
Checking job status...

The job_id above is shown in its full form. For convenience, you can use the shortened version, in this case: 3b39baee. For ease, we store the job_id in an environment variable.

$ export JOB_ID=3b39baee # make sure to use the right job id from the docker run command

Checking the State of your Jobs​

  • Job status: You can check the status of the job using bacalhau list. 
bacalhau list --id-filter ${JOB_ID}

When it says Completed, that means the job is done, and we can get the results.

 CREATED   ID        JOB                      STATE      VERIFIED  COMPLETED
 07:20:32  3b39baee  Docker ubuntu echo H...  Published            /ipfs/bafybeidu4zm6w...
info

For a comprehensive list of flags you can pass to the list command check out the related CLI Reference page.

  • Job information: You can find out more information about your job by using bacalhau describe.
bacalhau describe ${JOB_ID}
  • Job download: You can download your job results directly by using bacalhau get. Alternatively, you can choose to create a directory to store your results. In the command below, we created a directory called myfolder and download our job output to be stored in that directory.
$ mkdir -p /tmp/myfolder
$ cd /tmp/myfolder

bacalhau get $JOB_ID --output-dir results

After the download has finished you should see the following contents in results directory

Viewing your Job Output​

Each job creates 3 subfolders: the combined_results, per_shard files, and the raw directory. To view the file, run the following command:

$ cat /tmp/myfolder/job-id/combined_results/stdout

That should print out the string Hello World.

With that, you have just successfully run a job on the Bacalhau network! 🐟

Where to go next?​

Here are a few resources that provides a deeper dive into running jobs with Bacalhau:

Need Support?​

If have questions or need support or guidance, please reach out to the Bacalhau team via Slack (#bacalhau channel)