How To Install Apache Superset on Ubuntu

A warm hello to all my dear readers!

In this post I am going to describe how to install Apache Superset on a Ubuntu machine. Superset is an open source Business Intelligence software to analyze data for taking business decisions.

Since organizations are more statistics focused nowadays than ever before, therefore I thought to explore Apache superset for my team requirements.

Apache Superset Installation

We will use docker compose to bring up a superset instance. Let us proceed with the steps:

Clone superset repo

$ git clone https://github.com/apache/superset.git

Generate a secret key

$ openssl rand -base64 42

Create a new config file

$ vim ./docker/pythonpath_dev/superset_config_docker.py
SECRET_KEY = '<Your secret key>'
WTF_CSRF_ENABLED = False
TALISMAN_ENABLED = False

Run docker compose

$ cd superset
$ docker-compose -f docker-compose-non-dev.yml up

Docker compose has instructions to create different containers for different components. Like it will create application, database. By default it creates postgresql instance.

Login to superset

Now let us login and explore the dashboard. By default superset runs on port 8088

http://lab.thestorywire.com:8088

Username: admin
Password: admin

Superset Data Storage

Let us see where is the data of Apache superset stored. With above installation using docker compose, a postgres database is created. All the superset configuration and even the example charts data is stored inside it.

By default a databased named superset is created with the username as superset. This is totally unsafe for a production deployment. Therefore, remember to change the username and password.

$ docker exec -it superset_db /bin/bash
# psql superset superset

psql (15.4 (Debian 15.4-2.pgdg120+1))
Type "help" for help.

superset=# \dt

Another database named examples is created. This stores all the sample data.

$ docker exec -it superset_db /bin/bash
# psql examples superset

psql (15.4 (Debian 15.4-2.pgdg120+1))
Type "help" for help.

examples=# \dt