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Installation Procedure

System dependencies

Before running these steps, ensure you have completed the installation steps for backend dependencies.

Running the howler server, once dependencies are installed, is fairly simple. First, we start up the dependencies. These include:

  1. Elasticsearch 8
  2. A redis instance
  3. A minio instance
  4. Keycloak (for OAuth authentication)
cd ~/repos/howler/api/dev
docker compose up

Now we install the python packages Howler depends on using Poetry:

cd ~/repos/howler/api

# Install poetry if you don't have it
python3 -m pip install poetry

# Configure poetry to create virtualenv in project directory
poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true

# Install dependencies (including test dependencies)
poetry install --with test

We need to setup a few folders on the system howler will use:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/howler/conf
sudo mkdir -p /etc/howler/lookups
sudo mkdir -p /var/log/howler

sudo chown -R $USER /etc/howler
sudo chown -R $USER /var/log/howler

And then we initialize the configurations:

# Copy configuration files
cp build_scripts/classification.yml /etc/howler/conf/classification.yml
cp build_scripts/mappings.yml /etc/howler/conf/mappings.yml
cp test/unit/config.yml /etc/howler/conf/config.yml

# Generate MITRE ATT&CK lookups
poetry run mitre /etc/howler/lookups

# Generate Sigma rules
poetry run sigma

Create default users for testing:

poetry run python howler/odm/random_data.py users

Finally, we can run howler!

poetry run server
# Or alternatively: poetry run python howler/app.py

The API server will start on http://localhost:5000 by default.