Install Pelican

This document lists the operating system requirements for Pelican and explains how a user can download and install Pelican.

Before Starting

Pelican executables can run as a client or a server.

To use the client for interacting with data, download and install the Pelican package or Pelican Binary following the instructions below.

For server usage, such as serving your data to a Pelican data federation or to start a new Pelican data federation, you need to run Pelican using Pelican Docker images. It is not recommended to run Pelican server with a binary. Although technically possible, additional software dependencies and configurations are required to make the binary functional for server usage.

Supported Operating Systems

Pelican supports the following operating systems, when running as a client:

Note: Installation of Pelican on other operating systems is possible, but not recommended or supported.

Download Pelican Binary

Download the binary based on your operating system and CPU architecture. For instructions on how to install the binary, refer to the next section.

What version should I download?

Our versions are built like so: For example: 7.1.2

7 represents the major version release
1 represents feature releases
2 represents a bug fix/patch release

The download table above includes Pelican versions as old as 7.6.x To download older versions, please refer to the GitHub release page (opens in a new tab).

Install Pelican Binary

Linux

macOS

Install Pelican on macOS

Windows

Install Pelican on Windows

Install OSDF or Server Package

Pelican has two special packaging, OSDF and Server. The OSDF packaging, i.e. pelican-osdf-compat, is for running Pelican in Open Science Data Federation (OSDF). The Server packaging, i.e. pelican-server is for running Pelican services, e.g., an Origin or a Cache.

Both of the packages require Pelican package to be installed first. You may get the following error message if you only install the special package:

Problem: conflicting requests
  - nothing provides pelican needed by pelican-osdf-compat-7.8.5-1.aarch64 from @commandline

To fix the issue, install the Pelican package first by following the instructions above.

The server components require xrootd-server >= 5.6.3 because of some of the patches Pelican needs. For Ubuntu users, it is required to install Pelican server package on Ubuntu 24.04 ("noble") and above.

Verify Pelican Is Installed

If you installed Pelican as a standalone binary, or if you installed Pelican on macOS or Windows operating systems, you need to add Pelican to your PATH environment variable before proceeding. Follow the instructions for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

Run the following command after you installed Pelican
- Linux and macOS:
```
which pelican
```
  It should output something similar to
```
/bin/pelican
```
- Windows:
```
where pelican
```
  It should output something similar to
```
C:\Program Files\Pelican\pelican.exe
```

Test Pelican client function by running an object copy command that downloads a test file from Open Science Data Federation (OSDF) (opens in a new tab) to your current directory

$ pelican object copy pelican://osg-htc.org/ospool/uc-shared/public/OSG-Staff/validation/test.txt .
test.txt 14.00b / 14.00b [=============================================================================================] Done!

Next Steps

Core Concepts CentOS, Fedora, or openSUSE