Set up a standalone Pulsar locally

For local development and testing, you can run Pulsar in standalone mode on your machine. The standalone mode includes a Pulsar broker, the necessary ZooKeeper and BookKeeper components running inside of a single Java Virtual Machine (JVM) process.

Pulsar in production?

If you're looking to run a full production Pulsar installation, see the Deploying a Pulsar instance guide.

Install Pulsar standalone

This tutorial guides you through every step of the installation process.

System requirements

Pulsar is currently available for MacOS and Linux. To use Pulsar, you need to install Java 8.

Install Pulsar using binary release

To get started with Pulsar, download a binary tarball release in one of the following ways:

• download from the Apache mirror (Pulsar 2.4.0 binary release)

• download from the Pulsar downloads page

• download from the Pulsar releases page

• use wget:

$ wget https://archive.apache.org/dist/pulsar/pulsar-2.4.0/apache-pulsar-2.4.0-bin.tar.gz

After you download the tarball, untar it and use the cd command to navigate to the resulting directory:

$ tar xvfz apache-pulsar-2.4.0-bin.tar.gz
$ cd apache-pulsar-2.4.0

What your package contains

The Pulsar binary package initially contains the following directories:

These directories are created once you begin running Pulsar.

Tip

If you want to use builtin connectors and tiered storage offloaders, you can install them according to the following instructions：

• Install builtin connectors (optional)
• Install tiered storage offloaders (optional)

Otherwise, skip this step and perform the next step Start Pulsar standalone. Pulsar can be successfully installed without installing bulitin connectors and tiered storage offloaders.

Install builtin connectors (optional)

Since 2.1.0-incubating release, Pulsar releases a separate binary distribution, containing all the builtin connectors.To enable those builtin connectors, you can download the connectors tarball release in one of the following ways:

• download from the Apache mirror Pulsar IO Connectors 2.4.0 release

• download from the Pulsar downloads page

• download from the Pulsar releases page

• use wget:

$ wget https://archive.apache.org/dist/pulsar/pulsar-2.4.0/connectors/{connector}-2.4.0.nar

After you download the nar file, copy the file to the connectors directory in the pulsar directory.For example, if you download the pulsar-io-aerospike-2.4.0.nar connector file, enter the following commands:

$ mkdir connectors
$ mv pulsar-io-aerospike-2.4.0.nar connectors
$ ls connectors
pulsar-io-aerospike-2.4.0.nar
...

Note

• If you are running Pulsar in a bare metal cluster, make sure connectors tarball is unzipped in every pulsar directory of the broker(or in every pulsar directory of function-worker if you are running a separate worker cluster for Pulsar Functions).

• If you are running Pulsar in Docker or deploying Pulsar using a docker image (e.g. K8S or DCOS),you can use the apachepulsar/pulsar-all image instead of the apachepulsar/pulsar image. apachepulsar/pulsar-all image has already bundled all builtin connectors.

Install tiered storage offloaders (optional)

Tip

Since 2.2.0 release, Pulsar releases a separate binary distribution, containing the tiered storage offloaders.To enable tiered storage feature, follow the instructions below; otherwise skip this section.

To get started with tiered storage offloaders, you need to download the offloaders tarball release on every broker node in one of the following ways:

• download from the Apache mirror Pulsar Tiered Storage Offloaders 2.4.0 release

• download from the Pulsar downloads page

• download from the Pulsar releases page

• use wget:

$ wget https://archive.apache.org/dist/pulsar/pulsar-2.4.0/apache-pulsar-offloaders-2.4.0-bin.tar.gz

After you download the tarball, untar the offloaders package and copy the offloaders as offloadersin the pulsar directory:

$ tar xvfz apache-pulsar-offloaders-2.4.0-bin.tar.gz
// you will find a directory named `apache-pulsar-offloaders-2.4.0` in the pulsar directory
// then copy the offloaders
$ mv apache-pulsar-offloaders-2.4.0/offloaders offloaders
$ ls offloaders
tiered-storage-jcloud-2.4.0.nar

For more information on how to configure tiered storage, see Tiered storage cookbook.

Note

• If you are running Pulsar in a bare metal cluster, make sure that offloaders tarball is unzipped in every broker's pulsar directory.

• If you are running Pulsar in Docker or deploying Pulsar using a docker image (e.g. K8S or DCOS),you can use the apachepulsar/pulsar-all image instead of the apachepulsar/pulsar image. apachepulsar/pulsar-all image has already bundled tiered storage offloaders.

Start Pulsar standalone

Once you have an up-to-date local copy of the release, you can start a local cluster using the pulsar command, which is stored in the bin directory, and specifying that you want to start Pulsar in standalone mode.

$ bin/pulsar standalone

If you have started Pulsar successfully, you will see INFO-level log messages like this:

2017-06-01 14:46:29,192 - INFO  - [main:WebSocketService@95] - Configuration Store cache started
2017-06-01 14:46:29,192 - INFO  - [main:AuthenticationService@61] - Authentication is disabled
2017-06-01 14:46:29,192 - INFO  - [main:WebSocketService@108] - Pulsar WebSocket Service started

Tip

• The service is running on your terminal, which is under your direct control. If you need to run other commands, open a new terminal window.You can also run the service as a background process using the pulsar-daemon start standalone command. For more information, see pulsar-daemon.

• When you start a local standalone cluster, a public/default namespace is created automatically. The namespace is used for development purposes. All Pulsar topics are managed within namespaces. For more information, see Topics.

Use Pulsar standalone

Pulsar provides a CLI tool called pulsar-client. The pulsar-client tool enables you to consume and produce messages to a Pulsar topic in a running cluster.

Consume a message

The following command consumes a message with the subscription name first-subscription to the my-topic topic:

$ bin/pulsar-client consume my-topic -s "first-subscription"

If the message has been successfully consumed, you will see a confirmation like the following in the pulsar-client logs:

09:56:55.566 [pulsar-client-io-1-1] INFO  org.apache.pulsar.client.impl.MultiTopicsConsumerImpl - [TopicsConsumerFakeTopicNamee2df9] [first-subscription] Success subscribe new topic my-topic in topics consumer, partitions: 4, allTopicPartitionsNumber: 4

Tip

As you have noticed that we do not explicitly create the my-topic topic, to which we consume the message. When you consume a message to a topic that does not yet exist, Pulsar creates that topic for you automatically. Producing a message to a topic that does not exist will automatically create that topic for you as well.

Produce a message

The following command produces a message saying hello-pulsar to the my-topic topic:

$ bin/pulsar-client produce my-topic --messages "hello-pulsar"

If the message has been successfully published to the topic, you will see a confirmation like the following in the pulsar-client logs:

13:09:39.356 [main] INFO  org.apache.pulsar.client.cli.PulsarClientTool - 1 messages successfully produced

Stop Pulsar standalone

Press Ctrl+C to stop a local standalone Pulsar.

Tip

If the service runs as a background process using the pulsar-daemon start standalone command, then use the pulsar-daemon stop standalone command to stop the service.

For more information, see pulsar-daemon.