My Experience Installing InfluxDB on Mac OS X Big Sur

For personal quant trading work, I need a schema-less database to keep track of data and support Grafana dashboards. I decided to try out InfluxDB OSS on my MacBook Air with Big Sur. Here are my notes for getting InfluxDB installed and working properly.

Installation of InfluxDB 1.8.3 with HomeBrew

I recently did a fresh install of Big Sur on my MacBook. Moving forward, I want to be more disciplined on how I install and manage packages/apps, so now I use HomeBrew for all apps not available from the App Store.

With that in mind, I followed the instructions in the InfluxDB documentation and installed it with the following shell command:

$ brew install influxdb

Once the install completed successfully I then followed instructions in the previous command output to start the InfluxDB service with:

$ brew services start influxdb

That one immediately started the service, and so then I tried connecting to the service with the InfluxDB command-line interface (CLI):

$ influx
Connected to http://localhost:8086 version 1.8.3
InfluxDB shell version: 1.8.3

Great, everything looks to be working well. You can exit from the CLI and return to the shell prompt with:

> exit

Time Saving Tip: Pay Attention to Your InfluxDB Version

When I began this effort, I noticed that the documentation I was using defaulted to the most recent version, v2.0. I should have paid more attention to that fact because I lost a bit of time following the Getting Started for v2.0 rather than what I installed, v1.8. Beware: The getting started experience has changed.

Related Posts

  • Integrating Quant Data, InfluxDB, and Python
  • Integrating InfluxDB and Grafana

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