title: Apache NiFi Development Quickstart containerEnabled: true

Apache NiFi Development Quickstart

Source Code

Apache NiFi source code is version controlled using Git version control (browse|checkout) and mirrored to GitHub.
The NiFi website source code is available (browse|checkout) and mirrored to GitHub.
The NiFi NAR maven plugin source code is available (browse|checkout) and mirrored to GitHub.

Issue Tracking

Track issues on the “NIFI” Project on the Apache JIRA (browse).

Building

Configure your git client

We recommend running the following git config commands in order to ensure that git checks out the repository in a consistent manner. These changes are particularly important if running on Windows, as the git client has trouble with long filenames otherwise. Additionally, in Windows, the default behavior of the git client, when installed, is to set the core.autocrlf configuration option to true, which can cause some of the unit tests to fail.

git config --global core.longpaths true
git config --global core.autocrlf false

Checking out from Git

To check out the code:

git clone https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/nifi.git

git checkout main

git checkout -b 0.x origin/0.x

Linux Operating System Configuration

NOTE: If you are building on Linux, consider these best practices. Typical Linux defaults are not necessarily well tuned for the needs of an IO intensive application like NiFi. For all of these areas, your distribution's requirements may vary. Use these sections as advice, but consult your distribution-specific documentation for how best to achieve these recommendations.

Maximum File Handles

NiFi will at any one time potentially have a very large number of file handles open. Increase the limits by editing /etc/security/limits.conf to add something like:

*  hard  nofile  50000
*  soft  nofile  50000

Maximum Forked Processes

NiFi may be configured to generate a significant number of threads. Increase the allowable number by editing /etc/security/limits.conf to add something like: * hard nproc 10000 * soft nproc 10000

Your distribution may require an edit to /etc/security/limits.d/90-nproc.conf by adding: * soft nproc 10000

Increase the number of TCP socket ports available

This is particularly important if your flow will be setting up and tearing down a large number of sockets in small period of time.

sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ip_local_port_range="10000 65000"

Set how long sockets stay in a TIMED_WAIT state when closed

You don't want your sockets to sit and linger too long given that you want to be able to quickly setup and teardown new sockets. It is a good idea to read more about it but to adjust do something like

sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.netfilter.ip_conntrack_tcp_timeout_time_wait="1"

Tell Linux you never want NiFi to swap

Swapping is fantastic for some applications. It isn‘t good for something like NiFi that always wants to be running. To tell Linux you’d like swapping off, you can edit /etc/sysctl.conf to add the following line

vm.swappiness = 0

Disable partition atime

For the partitions handling the various NiFi repos, turn off things like atime. Doing so can cause a surprising bump in throughput. Edit the /etc/fstab file and for the partition(s) of interest add the noatime option.

Additional guidance

Additional information on system administration and settings can be located in our Administrator's Guide.

Build steps

  1. You need a recent Java 8 (or newer) JDK for the 1.x NiFi line. Older Java 8 (such as 1.8.0_31) is known to fail with some unit tests, ensure to use the most recent version. The 0.x line works on Java 7 or newer.
  2. You need Apache Maven 3.1.0 or newer.
  3. You need a recent git client for the 1.x NiFi line.
  4. Ensure your MAVEN_OPTS provides sufficient memory. Some build steps are fairly memory intensive
    • These settings have worked well MAVEN_OPTS="-Xms1024m -Xmx3076m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m"
  5. Build the entire code base. In the root dir of the source tree run mvn -T C2.0 clean install -Pinclude-grpc You can tweak the maven build settings as you like but the previous command will execute with 2 threads per core. You can omit the -Pinclude-grpc if you're not on a platform that it supports. Include -DskipTests to compile tests, but skip running them.

Now you should have a fully functioning build off the latest codebase.

NOTE: During development it is not necessary to build the entire code base. Typically, in case of a NAR bundle change you can build only the particular bundle followed by running mvn -T C2.0 clean install -Ddir-only in nifi-assembly.

Running the application

Decompress and launch

Running the above build will create a tar.gz (and zip) file in ./nifi-assembly/target. This tar.gz should contain the full application. Decompressing the tar.gz should make a directory for you containing several other directories. conf contains application configuration, bin contains scripts for launching the application. On Linux and OSX, NiFi can be run using bin/nifi.sh <command> where <command> is one of:

  • start: starts NiFi in the background
  • stop: stops NiFi that is running in the background
  • status: provides the current status of NiFi
  • run: runs NiFi in the foreground and waits to receive a Ctrl-C, which then shuts down NiFi.
  • install: (available in Linux only, not OSX): installs NiFi as a service that can then be controlled via service nifi start, service nifi stop, service nifi status.

For Windows users, the following scripts exist in the bin directory:

  • run-nifi.bat: runs NiFi in the foreground and waits to receive a Ctrl-C, which then shuts down NiFi
  • status-nifi.bat: provides the current status of NiFi

The configuration that is to be used when launching NiFi, such as Java heap size, the user to run as, which Java command to use, etc. are configurable via the conf/bootstrap.conf file.

The entire concept of how the application will integrate to a given OS and run as an enduring service is something we're working hard on and would appreciate ideas for. The user experience needs to be excellent.

With the default settings you can point a web browser at https://127.0.0.1:8443/nifi

The default installation generates a random username and password, writing the generated values to the application log. The application log is located in logs/nifi-app.log under the installation directory. The log file will contain lines with Generated Username [USERNAME] and Generated Password [PASSWORD] indicating the credentials needed for access. Search the application log for those lines and record the generated values in a secure location.

The following command can be used to change the username and password:

$ ./bin/nifi.sh set-single-user-credentials <username> <password>

Logging is configured by default to log to ./logs/nifi-app.log. The following log message should indicate the web UI is ready for use:

2014-12-09 00:42:03,540 INFO [main] org.apache.nifi.web.server.JettyServer NiFi has started. The UI is available at the following URLs: