Running Butler as a Node.js application

How to install Butler as a Node.js application.

Selecting an OS

While Qlik Sense Enterprise is a Windows only system, Butler should be able to run on any OS where Node.js is available.
Butler has been succesfully used - during development and production - on Windows, Linux (Debian and Ubuntu tested) and mac OS.

Prerequisites

What Comment
Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows Mandatory. Butler is developed with Qlik Sense Enterprise on Windows (QSEoW) in mind.
While some Butler features might also work with Sense Desktop or Sense cloud, you are on your own there.
Node.js Mandatory. Butler is written in Node - which is thus a firm requirement.
MQTT broker Optional. MQTT is used for both in- and out-bound pub-sub messaging. Butler assumes a working MQTT broker is available, the IP of which is defined in the Butler config file. Mosquitto is a great open source broker. It requires very little hardware to run, even the smallest (usually free) Amazon/Google/Microsoft/… instance is enough, if you want a dedicated MQTT server. If you don’t care about the pubsub features of Butler, you don’t need a MQTT broker. In this case you can disable the MQTT features in the config YAML file.
InfluxDB Optional. A database for realtime information, used to store metrics around Butler’s own memory usage over time (if this feature is enabled).

Installation steps

The steps below outline the steps needed to install Butler as a native Node.js application on for example Windows Server.

Additional information is found on the Day 2 operations page.

  • Install node.js
    Butler has been developed and tested using the 64 bit version of Node.js. The most recent LTS (Long Term Support) version is usually a good choice.

  • Decide where to install Butler
    It is usually a good starting point to run Butler on the Sense server. If there are more than one server in the Sense cluster, Butler can be placed on the reload server (as the /createDir endpoint then can be used to create folders in which QVD and other files can be stored).

    On the other hand, you might want to keep the Sense servers as clean as possible (with respect to software running on them). If that is a priority you should install Butler on some other server.

    The bottom line is that Butler can run on any server, as long as there is network connectivity to the Sense server(s).

  • Download Butler
    Download the repository zip from the releases page.

    Do not just clone the Butler repository as that will give you the latest development version, which may not yet be fully tested and packaged.
    The exception is of course if you want to contribute to Butler development - then forking and cloning the repository is the right thing to do.

  • Install node dependencies
    From a Windows command prompt (assuming the Butler ZIP file/repository was saved to d:\node\butler):

      d:
  cd \node\butler\src
  npm install

    This will download and install all Node.js modules used by Butler.
    On some OSs you’ll get some warnings during the installation - they are usually harmless. Try to run Butler even if you got some warnings, chances are good that things will work just fine. This is common on especially Windows Server and is a result of some Butler dependencies being primarily developed on Linux rather than Windows.

  • MQTT message broker

    Several of Butler’s features use MQTT for sending and receiving messages.
    MQTT is a standardised messaging protocol and it should be possible to use any broker following the MQTT standard.

    Butler has been developed and tested using Mosquitto running on mac OS, Debian Linux and Docker - all work flawlessly.


Last modified 2022-04-07: 7.2.0 release (ad12814)