If you can’t or don’t want to use Docker, you can also run Lighthouse on your system directly.

Prerequisites

The packages provided by Lighthouse have everything included you need to run it, so there are no prerequisites.

Lighthouse runs on Windows, MacOs, and Linux based systems.

Download Lighthouse

Download the latest version of Lighthouse for your operating system from the Releases. Download the zip file, and extract it to the location you want to run the application from.

Updating Lighthouse

If you want to update Lighthouse, you can simply replace the files in the directory.

As the published packages do not include the database, you will keep your data. Lighthouse will in normal circumstances always support migrations to newer versions, so you will not lose any data.

You must make sure to stop Lighthouse from running before updating.

Installation and Update Scripts

If you don’t want to manually download it, you can also use the following scripts, which will look for the latest released version and will download and extract it from the directory you run the script from.

The scripts are part of the packages, so you can execute them from the installation directory.

Windows

You can run the Powershell script update_windows.ps1. In order to do so, you need to have PowerShell 5.1 or later which is normally installed at your system.

You can also directly download the latest version into your current directory by executing the following command in your terminal:

iwr 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LetPeopleWork/Lighthouse/main/Scripts/update_windows.ps1' | iex

Linux

For Linux, there is a bash script called update_linux.sh. It requires unzip to be installed, which you can do by running the following command:

sudo apt-get install unzip

You can also directly download the latest version into your current directory by executing the following command in your terminal:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LetPeopleWork/Lighthouse/main/Scripts/update_linux.sh | bash

MacOS

For MacOS, there is a bash script called update_mac.sh. It requires unzip to be installed, which is usually pre-installed on MacOS.

You can also directly download the latest version into your current directory by executing the following command in your terminal:

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LetPeopleWork/Lighthouse/main/Scripts/update_mac.sh | bash

Run Lighthouse

Once downloaded, you can run the the Lighthouse application:

  • Lighthouse.exe on Windows
  • Lighthouse on MacOS and Linux

A terminal will open and you should see a window similar to this:

Starting Lighthouse

By default, Lighthouse will start running on the system on port 5001. If everything worked as expected, you can open the app now in your browser via https://localhost:5001.

You should see the (empty) landing page: Landing Page

Using this approach, you’ll have to restart Lighthouse after every restart. What you can do instead is to register it as a service, that way it will run automatically in the background.

See Run as Service for more details.