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Unifi Network Server (Controller)

Purpose: If you need to deploy Unifi Controller bare-metal into a virtual machine, you can do so with a few simple commands. You can feel free to reference the original documentation if additional clarity is needed.

Assumptions

This document assumes that you are running Ubuntu Server (22.04 or higher). The instructions are not designed to accomodate RHEL-based Linux distributions.

INCOMPLETE DOCUMENT

This document was originally written with the intention of comprehensively covering the deployment of the MongoDB server and Unifi Network Controller. However, I opted to use an automated scripted installation approach seen here that was almost turn-key instead.

apt-get update; apt-get install ca-certificates curl -y
curl -sO https://get.glennr.nl/unifi/install/install_latest/unifi-latest.sh && bash unifi-latest.sh

Install Components

The installation will consist of a MongoDB server and a Unifi Network (controller) server. You will install the database first, then install the Unifi Controller second, so it can provision the newly-installed local MongoDB database server.

General Configuration

We need to configure APT with a few commands to ensure that we can download the MongoDB and Unifi packages.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install ca-certificates apt-transport-https
echo 'deb [ arch=amd64,arm64 ] https://www.ui.com/downloads/unifi/debian stable ubiquiti' | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/100-ubnt-unifi.list
sudo wget -O /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/unifi-repo.gpg https://dl.ui.com/unifi/unifi-repo.gpg
echo "deb [trusted=yes] https://repo.mongodb.org/apt/ubuntu bionic/mongodb-org/3.6 multiverse" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mongodb-org-3.6.list
sudo apt-get update

Alternative GPG Key Installation

If you run into issues installing the GPG key for the Unifi packages, you can alternatively run the command seen below:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 06E85760C0A52C50

MongoDB Server

Run the following commands install and enable automatic startup for the MongoDB server. Original reference documentation can be found here.