XRootD: eXtended ROOT Daemon

The XRootD project provides a high-performance, fault-tolerant, and secure solution for handling massive amounts of data distributed across multiple storage resources, such as disk servers, tape libraries, and remote sites. It enables efficient data access and movement in a transparent and uniform manner, regardless of the underlying storage technology or location. It was initially developed by the High Energy Physics (HEP) community to meet the data storage and access requirements of the BaBar experiment at SLAC and later extended to meet the needs of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. XRootD is the core technology powering the EOS distributed filesystem, which is the storage solution used by LHC experiments and the storage backend for CERNBox. XRootD is also used as the core technology for global CDN deployments across multiple science domains.

XRootD is based on a scalable architecture that supports multi-protocol communications. XRootD provides a set of plugins and tools that allows the user to configure it freely to deploy data access clusters of any size, and which can include sophisticated features such as erasure coded files, various methods of authentication and authorization, as well as integration with other storage systems like ceph.

Documentation

General documentation such as configuration reference guides, and user manuals can be found on the XRootD website at http://xrootd.org/docs.html.

Supported Operating Systems

XRootD is officially supported on the following platforms:

• RedHat Enterprise Linux 7 or later and their derivatives
• Debian 11 and Ubuntu 22.04 or later
• macOS 11 (Big Sur) or later

Support for other operating systems is provided on a best-effort basis and by contributions from the community.

Installation Instructions

XRootD is available via official channels in most operating systems. Installation via your system's package manager should be preferred.

In RPM-based distributions, like CentOS, Alma, Rocky, Fedora, etc, one can search and install XRootD packages with

$ sudo yum install xrootd

or

$ sudo dnf install xrootd

In RHEL-based distributions, it will be necessary to first install the EPEL release repository with yum install epel-release or dnf install epel-release.

If you would like to use our official repository for XRootD RPMs, you can enable it on RHEL-based distributions with

$ sudo curl -L https://cern.ch/xrootd/xrootd.repo -o /etc/yum.repos.d/xrootd.repo

and on Fedora with

$ sudo curl -L https://cern.ch/xrootd/xrootd-fedora.repo -o /etc/yum.repos.d/xrootd.repo

On Debian 11 or later, and Ubuntu 22.04 or later, XRootD can be installed via apt

$ sudo apt install xrootd-client xrootd-server python3-xrootd

On macOS, XRootD is available via Homebrew

$ brew install xrootd

XRootD can also be installed with conda, as it is also available in conda-forge:

$ conda config --add channels conda-forge
$ conda config --set channel_priority strict
$ conda install xrootd

Finally, it is possible to install the XRootD python bindings from PyPI using pip:

$ pip install xrootd

For detailed instructions on how to build and install XRootD from source code, please see docs/INSTALL.md in the main repository on GitHub.

User Support and Bug Reports

Bugs should be reported using GitHub issues. You can open a new ticket by clicking here.

For general questions about XRootD, please send a message to our user mailing list at xrootd-l@slac.stanford.edu or open a new discussion on GitHub. Please check XRootD's contact page at http://xrootd.org/contact.html for further information.

Contributing

User contributions can be submitted via pull request on GitHub. We recommend that you create your own fork of XRootD on GitHub and use it to submit your patches. For more detailed instructions on how to contribute, please refer to the file docs/CONTRIBUTING.md.