Linux

Visit the official ArangoDB install page and download the correct package for your Linux distribution. You can find binary packages for the most common distributions there.
Follow the instructions to use your favorite package manager for the major distributions. After setting up the ArangoDB repository you can easily install ArangoDB using yum, aptitude, urpmi or zypper.
Debian based packages will ask for a password during installation. For an unattended installation for Debian, see below. Red-Hat based packages will set a random password during installation. For other distributions or to change the password, run arango-secure-installation to set a root password.
Alternatively, see Compiling if you want to build ArangoDB yourself.
Start up the database server.

Normally, this is done by executing the following command:

unix> /etc/init.d/arangod start

It will start the server, and do that as well at system boot time.

To stop the server you can use the following command:

unix> /etc/init.d/arangod stop

The exact commands depend on your Linux distribution. You may require root privileges to execute these commands.

Linux Mint

Please use the corresponding Ubuntu or Debian packages.

Unattended Installation

Debian based package will ask for a password during installation. For unattended installation, you can set the password using the debconf helpers.

echo arangodb3 arangodb3/password password NEWPASSWORD | debconf-set-selections
echo arangodb3 arangodb3/password_again password NEWPASSWORD | debconf-set-selections

The commands should be executed prior to the installation.

Red-Hat based packages will set a random password during installation. If you want to force a password, execute

ARANGODB_DEFAULT_ROOT_PASSWORD=NEWPASSWORD arango-secure-installation

The command should be executed after the installation.

Non-Standard Installation

If you compiled ArangoDB from source and did not use any installation package – or using non-default locations and/or multiple ArangoDB instances on the same host – you may want to start the server process manually. You can do so by invoking the arangod binary from the command line as shown below:

unix> /usr/local/sbin/arangod /tmp/vocbase
20ZZ-XX-YYT12:37:08Z [8145] INFO using built-in JavaScript startup files
20ZZ-XX-YYT12:37:08Z [8145] INFO ArangoDB (version 1.x.y) is ready for business
20ZZ-XX-YYT12:37:08Z [8145] INFO Have Fun!

To stop the database server gracefully, you can either press CTRL-C or by send the SIGINT signal to the server process. On many systems this can be achieved with the following command:

unix> kill -2 `pidof arangod`

Once you started the server, there should be a running instance of arangod - the ArangoDB database server.

unix> ps auxw | fgrep arangod
arangodb 14536 0.1 0.6 5307264 23464 s002 S 1:21pm 0:00.18 /usr/local/sbin/arangod

If there is no such process, check the log file /var/log/arangodb/arangod.log for errors. If you see a log message like

2012-12-03T11:35:29Z [12882] ERROR Database directory version (1) is lower than server version (1.2).
2012-12-03T11:35:29Z [12882] ERROR It seems like you have upgraded the ArangoDB binary. If this is what you wanted to do, please restart with the --database.auto-upgrade option to upgrade the data in the database directory.
2012-12-03T11:35:29Z [12882] FATAL Database version check failed. Please start the server with the --database.auto-upgrade option

make sure to start the server once with the --database.auto-upgrade option.

Note that you may have to enable logging first. If you start the server in a shell, you should see errors logged there as well.