Technical requirements

To try out some of the commands in this chapter, you will need a single-node CockroachDB cluster. There are several ways of installing CockroachDB on a computer, as outlined here:

• Use a package manager such as Homebrew to install it, but this option only works on a Mac.
• Download binaries, extract it, and set it in the PATH variable.
• Use Kubernetes to orchestrate CockroachDB pods.
• Build from source and install.
• Download a Docker image and run it.

In the current chapter, we will just go over how to run CockroachDB using Docker since the steps are common, irrespective of the operating system that you are using.

To use CockroachDB with Docker, you need a computer with the following:

• At least 4 gigabytes (GB) of random-access memory (RAM)
• 250 GB of disk space
• Docker installed

In the next section, we will learn about installing CockroachDB.