Linux Installation Guide

Last modified on February 24, 2025

Overview

This guide describes how to install StrongDM on your Linux machine. In a Linux environment, StrongDM consists of a command-line interface (CLI). You may be able to run some CLI commands without a complete installation. If you wish to use StrongDM in this way, check the Run Without Installation section.

Install StrongDM

Troubleshooting installation

If you have any issues during installation, consider the following:

  • The installer must be run by a user that exists in the /etc/passwd file. Any users remotely authenticated, such as with LDAP or an SSO service, may fail to complete the installation.
  • If you are installing with Fedora Linux, use the -E flag to preserve the user environment. This is necessary due to the way Fedora handles sudo.
  • If you are attempting to set up a relay rather than a client, see Relays.

Run Without Installation

Once you have downloaded and unzipped StrongDM, you can run certain commands without completing a full installation.

For instance, to run sdm audit or sdm admin commands, you can provide an admin token in the SDM_ADMIN_TOKEN environment variable. However, connecting to datasources or servers requires a running SDM daemon, so we suggest running the full installation:

The output is similar to:

  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100   128  100   128    0     0    384      0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:--   384
100 6733k  100 6733k    0     0  2896k      0  0:00:02  0:00:02 --:--:-- 3435k
curl: Saved to filename 'sdmcli_40.87.0_linux_amd64.zip'
$ unzip sdmcli_40.87.0_linux_amd64.zip
Archive:  sdmcli_40.87.0_linux_amd64.zip
  inflating: sdm
$ export SDM_ADMIN_TOKEN=<token here>
$ ./sdm audit users
User ID,Email,First Name,Last Name,Role ID,StrongDM Permission,Role Name
1111,user1@organization.com,User,One,0,user,,{},[],0
2222,user2@organization.com,User,Two,,10011,admin,Engineers,{},[],0
3333,user3@organization.com,User,Three,10011,admin,Engineers,{},[],0

For detailed information on how to use the CLI, please see the CLI Reference documentation.

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