How to do an unattended install of Greenplum components on Linux

Products

• VMware Tanzu Greenplum

Environment

Resolution

On Linux it is possible to pipe answers to all the questions the Greenplum installer asks the user when doing the installation manually. 

This example uses Greenplum Database but the same holds true for all of the installers such as Greenplum Loaders.

Using Greenplum binary installer version 5.x as an example we can run the installer to see that it has several prompts that need answered:

Do you accept the Pivotal Database license agreement? [yes|no]
Answer - yes

Provide the installation path for Greenplum Database or press ENTER to
accept the default installation path: /usr/local/greenplum-db-5.5.0
Answer - enter

Install Greenplum Database into /usr/local/greenplum-db-5.5.0? [yes|no]
Answer - yes

/usr/local/greenplum-db-5.5.0 does not exist.
Create /usr/local/greenplum-db-5.5.0 ? [yes|no]
(Selecting no will exit the installer)
Answer - yes

Using printf we can now pipe the answers to these questions into the binary installer, using '\n' to simulate the enter key and piping everything into an installer.log file should something go wrong: 

[root@gpdb-sandbox ~]# printf 'yes\n\nyes\nyes\n' | /bin/bash /home/gpadmin/greenplum-loaders-5.4.1-rhel6-x86_64.bin 2>&1 > installer.log