open-nomad/website/source/docs/cluster/manual.html.md

layout	page_title	sidebar_current	description
docs	Manually Bootstrapping a Nomad Cluster	docs-cluster-manual	Learn how to manually bootstrap a Nomad cluster using the server-join command. This section also discusses Nomad federation across multiple datacenters and regions.

Manual Bootstrapping

Manually bootstrapping a Nomad cluster does not rely on additional tooling, but does require operator participation in the cluster formation process. When bootstrapping, Nomad servers and clients must be started and informed with the address of at least one Nomad server.

As you can tell, this creates a chicken-and-egg problem where one server must first be fully bootstrapped and configured before the remaining servers and clients can join the cluster. This requirement can add additional provisioning time as well as ordered dependencies during provisioning.

First, we bootstrap a single Nomad server and capture its IP address. After we have that nodes IP address, we place this address in the configuration.

For Nomad servers, this configuration may look something like this:

server {
  enabled          = true
  bootstrap_expect = 3

  # This is the IP address of the first server we provisioned
  retry_join = ["<known-address>:4648"]
}

Alternatively, the address can be supplied after the servers have all been started by running the server-join command on the servers individual to cluster the servers. All servers can join just one other server, and then rely on the gossip protocol to discover the rest.

$ nomad server-join <known-address>

For Nomad clients, the configuration may look something like:

client {
  enabled = true
  servers = ["<known-address>:4647"]
}

At this time, there is no equivalent of the server-join command for Nomad clients.

The port corresponds to the RPC port. If no port is specified with the IP address, the default RCP port of 4647 is assumed.

As servers are added or removed from the cluster, this information is pushed to the client. This means only one server must be specified because, after initial contact, the full set of servers in the client's region are shared with the client.