Install RethinkDB on Ubuntu

Looking for another platform? See the complete list of platforms RethinkDB supports.

With binaries

We provide binaries for 64-bit Ubuntu Trusty and above (>= 14.04).

To install the server, you have to add the RethinkDB repository to your list of repositories and install via apt-get. To do this, paste the following lines into your terminal:

Ubuntu 20.04 and above

(This set of instructions might also work on earlier Ubuntus, but that has not been verified.)

# Download the public key.
wget -qO- https://download.rethinkdb.com/repository/raw/pubkey.gpg | \
    sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/rethinkdb-archive-keyrings.gpg

# Add the repository.
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/rethinkdb-archive-keyrings.gpg] https://download.rethinkdb.com/repository/ubuntu-$(lsb_release -cs) $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rethinkdb.list

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rethinkdb

# Check installation.
rethinkdb --version

Earlier Ubuntu versions

As of 22.04, you’ll get deprecation warnings if you use apt-key.

source /etc/lsb-release && echo "deb https://download.rethinkdb.com/repository/ubuntu-$DISTRIB_CODENAME $DISTRIB_CODENAME main" | \
    sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rethinkdb.list
wget -qO- https://download.rethinkdb.com/repository/raw/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rethinkdb

# Check installation.
rethinkdb --version

If you followed the above instructions before July 2017 and want to upgrade to a newer version of RethinkDB, you will need to first download the new key (0742918E5C8DA04A):

$ wget -qO- https://download.rethinkdb.com/repository/raw/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -v -

Compile from source

Get the build dependencies

Install the dependencies (use python on older systems – Python 2 works):

sudo apt-get install build-essential protobuf-compiler \
                     python3 python-is-python3 \
                     libprotobuf-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev \
                     libboost-all-dev m4 g++ libssl-dev \
                     libjemalloc-dev

Get the source code

Download and extract the archive:

wget https://download.rethinkdb.com/repository/raw/dist/rethinkdb-2.4.4.tgz
tar xf rethinkdb-2.4.4.tgz

Build the server

Kick off the build process:

cd rethinkdb-2.4.4
./configure --allow-fetch --fetch boost
make -j8
sudo make install

Next steps: Now that you’ve installed RethinkDB, it’s time to install client drivers for your language.