Docker Compose

Start a new instance and SSH into it

Enter your cloud provider interface and navigate to the VM instance section. This is EC2 on AWS, Compute Engine on GCP, and Virtual Machines on Azure. Create a new instance.

We recommend that you use at least 4 cores and 16 GiB of memory, e.g. a t3.xlarge on AWS. Assign a public IP address in case you want to send traces from external sources. As observability data tends to be large in volume, choose a sufficient amount of storage, e.g. 100GiB.

The rest of this guide will assume that you have an Ubuntu OS running on your VM and are connected via SSH.

Install Docker and Docker Compose

Install docker (see official guide as well). Setup Docker’s apt repository:

# Add Docker's official GPG key:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
sudo curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg -o /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc
sudo chmod a+r /etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc
 
# Add the repository to Apt sources:
echo \
  "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/docker.asc] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  $(. /etc/os-release && echo "$VERSION_CODENAME") stable" | \
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update

Install Docker packages:

sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io docker-buildx-plugin docker-compose-plugin

Verify installlation:

sudo docker run hello-world

Clone Langfuse Repository

Get a copy of the latest Langfuse repository:

git clone https://github.com/langfuse/langfuse.git
 
cd langfuse

Update Secrets

For testing purposes, the pre-configured variables in the docker-compose file are usually sufficient. Feel free to skip this step.

If you send any kind of sensitive data to the application or intend to keep it up for longer, we recommend that you modify the docker-compose file and overwrite the following environment variables:

• SALT: A random string used to hash passwords. It should be at least 32 characters long.
• ENCRYPTION_KEY: Generate this via openssl rand -base64 32.
• NEXTAUTH_SECRET: A random string used to sign JWT tokens.
• NEXTAUTH_URL: The URL where the application is hosted. Used for redirects after signup.

In addition, you can change the database and storage credentials to be more secure.

Start the application

docker compose up

Watch the containers being started and the logs flowing in. After about 2-3 minutes, the langfuse-web-1 container should log “Ready”. At this point you can proceed to the next step.

Done

And you are ready to go! Open http://<instance-ip>:3000 in your browser to access the Langfuse UI.

Depending on your configuration, you might need to open an SSH tunnel to your VM to access the IP. Please refer to your cloud provider’s documentation for how to do this.