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title: Development tips

Here are a few tips to ease the development of S4 applications.

Import an S4 project into your IDE

You can run gradlew eclipse or gradlew idea at the root of your S4 application directory. Then simply import the project into eclipse or intellij. You'll have both your application classes and S4 libraries imported to the classpath of the project.

In order to get the transitive dependencies of the platform included as well, you should:

• Download a source distribution

• Install S4 and its dependencies in your local maven repository

    // from s4 source distribution root directory
    ./gradlew install -DskipTests
  

• Then run gradlew eclipse or gradlew idea

Start a local Zookeeper instance

• Use the default test configuration (2 clusters with following configs: c=testCluster1:flp=12000:nbTasks=1 and c=testCluster2:flp=13000:nbTasks=1)

    s4 zkServer -t
  

• Start a Zookeeper instance with your custom configuration, e.g. with 1 partition:

    s4 zkServer -clusters=c=testCluster1:flp=12000:nbTasks=1
  

Load an application in a new node directly from an IDE

This allows to skip the packaging phase!

A requirement is that you have both the application classes and the S4 classes in your classpath. See above.

Then you just need to run the org.apache.s4.core.Main class and pass:

• the cluster name: -c=testCluster1
• the app class name: -appClass=myAppClass

If you use a local Zookeeper instance, there is no need to specify the -zk option.