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title: Quickstart weight: 1

In this section we’ll walk through building and starting an instance of Zipkin for checking out Zipkin locally.

Docker

If you are familiar with Docker, the quickest way to get started quickly is to use the Docker Zipkin project, which (in addition to being able to build docker images) provides scripts and a docker-compose.yml for launching pre-built images, e.g.

git clone https://github.com/openzipkin/docker-zipkin
cd docker-zipkin
docker-compose up

Running from Source

Zipkin can be run from source, if you are testing new features or cannot use Docker. The bin directory of the source repository provides scripts to minimize the amount of copy-pasting.

1. Get the zipkin source and change to its directory

   git clone https://github.com/openzipkin/zipkin
   cd zipkin
   

2. In separate terminal windows / tabs start

   1. The query server: ./bin/query
   2. The collector server: ./bin/collector
   3. The web server: ./bin/web

3. Create dummy traces: ./bin/tracegen

4. Open the UI at http://localhost:8080 and look at the traces!