Clowder consists of many pieces of software working together. Starting a new instance of clowder can be complex, especially to get all the pieces to work together. We highly recommend for users to use docker to get started. In docker all the components needed are packaged as containers. A container image is a lightweight, stand-alone, executable package of a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, settings. Using the containers makes it easier for the user to get started since all the software needed to run a piece is part of the container, no need to install libraries or additional software. To control the orchestration between these containers we leverage of docker compose. This will start the containers in the right order and makes sure the containers can talk with each other.
Installing Docker
You will need to have docker installed on your machine. You can find more information on how to get docker installed at: https://docs.docker.com/install/
You will also need to install docker-compose, this will be installed as part of docker on the Mac and Windows, for linux this is a separate install, see https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/