Bowtie Downloads

Bowtie installations are comprised of two distinct types of software: clients and controllers. This page explains how to acquire each.

When checksums are available for your desired download, we recommend validating the integrity of the package using an appropriate checksum tool. For example, on Linux, use the command sha256sum against a download to compare it to the checksum listed on the package distribution page.

sha256sum bowtie-service_amd64.deb

Client Packages

As part of Client Setup, you will need to Download the Client.

Client packages for each major operating system (Linux, Mac, and Windows) are available for download on Bowtie’s platforms page.

The package listing page offers a complete list of available versions. The operating systems listed under “Platform”, package formats listed under “Type”, and version may be filtered by clicking on them.

Platform pages like MacOS support appending /latest to the URL to automatically fetch the latest stable version of a package. For example, the following links will navigate directly to the latest downloads for each major platform:

• MacOS package

• Windows installer

• Ubuntu Linux

• CentOS Stream

Controller Images

Bowtie controllers are provided as operating system images.

Updates and New Images

After deploying any initial Controllers, you may elect to leverage Updating Controllers to bring deployed controllers up-to-date in-place without re-deploying updated machine images. No downsides to this approach exist and update channels are identical to their image-based counterparts.

Cloud Images

Instructions for Azure, GCE, and AWS are available. These image types are registered in their respective cloud platforms and so you will deploy Controllers against a recent image ID sourced from the official Bowtie account for the public cloud you’re operating within. Downloading from the Bowtie package distribution and download page is unnecessary for these deployment types but we do provide direct launch links for platforms like AWS to expedite the process.

Regions & Availability

If you deploy into a region that is not associated with any current Bowtie Controller image, please reach out to your Bowtie representative so we can make plans to support the additional regions.

Cloud Disk Images

If you operate in one of these cloud providers within a region that lacks a suitable cloud image to create new instances from, raw disk image files are provided for each that can be imported manually. To download these disk image files, see the pages AWS disks, Azure disks, or GCP disks and click on the link to see all packages for the platform, which will list all downloadable disk image files instead of cloud image resource IDs.

Note that if you install Controllers using this method, you may rely on Updating Controllers to update Controllers in-place from their original disk image version without needing to create images manually for each new version.

Virtual Machine Images

The same platforms download page as for Client Packages is available to browse and download these Controller images.

Download compression

Most images are provided in compressed .gz (gzip) format and may be decompressed with gunzip <filename> or gzip -d <filename> prior to use in their respective virtualization runtime. Some platforms such as GCE will accept system images in compressed form and do not require decompression before use.