---

title: Start a standalone cluster with Docker lead: Quickly start a Pulsar service in a single Docker container tags:

• standalone
• local
• docker next: ../Clients

---

For the purposes of local development and testing, you can run Pulsar in {% popover standalone %} mode on your own machine within a Docker container.

If you don't have Docker installed, you can download the Community edition and follow the instructions for your OS.

Starting Pulsar inside Docker

$ docker run -it \
  -p 6650:6650 \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v $PWD/data:/pulsar/data \
  apachepulsar/pulsar:{{site.current_version}} \
  bin/pulsar standalone --advertised-address 127.0.0.1

A few things to note about this command:

• -v $PWD/data:/pulsar/data: This will make the process inside the container to store the data and metadata in the filesystem outside the container, in order to not start “fresh” every time the container is restarted.
• --advertised-address 127.0.0.1: This is needed so that the Pulsar broker can advertise an IP address that is reachable from outside the Docker container. You can also use the host machine IP, if you want to make Pulsar standalone accessible from other machines.

If Pulsar has been successfully started, you should see INFO-level log messages like this:

2017-08-09 22:34:04,030 - INFO  - [main:WebService@213] - Web Service started at http://127.0.0.1:8080
2017-08-09 22:34:04,038 - INFO  - [main:PulsarService@335] - messaging service is ready, bootstrap service on port=8080, broker url=pulsar://127.0.0.1:6650, cluster=standalone, configs=org.apache.pulsar.broker.ServiceConfiguration@4db60246
...

{% include admonition.html type=“success” title=‘Automatically created namespace’ content=' When you start a local standalone cluster, Pulsar will automatically create a sample/standalone/ns1 namespace that you can use for development purposes. All Pulsar topics are managed within namespaces. For more info, see Topics.' %}

Start publishing and consuming messages

Pulsar currently offers client libraries for Java, Python, and C++. If you're running a local {% popover standalone %} cluster, you can use one of these root URLs for interacting with your cluster:

• pulsar://localhost:6650
• http://localhost:8080

Here's an example that lets you quickly get started with Pulsar by using the Python client API.

You can install the Pulsar Python client library directly from PyPI:

$ pip install pulsar-client

First create a consumer and subscribe to the topic:

import pulsar

client = pulsar.Client('pulsar://localhost:6650')
consumer = client.subscribe('persistent://sample/standalone/ns1/my-topic',
                            subscription_name='my-sub')

while True:
    msg = consumer.receive()
    print("Received message: '%s'" % msg.data())
    consumer.acknowledge(msg)

client.close()

Now we can start a producer to send some test messages:

import pulsar

client = pulsar.Client('pulsar://localhost:6650')
producer = client.create_producer('persistent://sample/standalone/ns1/my-topic')

for i in range(10):
    producer.send('hello-pulsar-%d' % i)

client.close()

Get the topic statistics

In Pulsar you can use REST, Java, or command-line tools to control every aspect of the system. You can find detailed documentation of all the APIs in the Admin API Overview.

In the simplest example, you can use curl to probe the stats for a particular topic:

$ curl http://localhost:8080/admin/persistent/sample/standalone/ns1/my-topic/stats | python -m json.tool

The output will be something like this:

{
  "averageMsgSize": 0.0,
  "msgRateIn": 0.0,
  "msgRateOut": 0.0,
  "msgThroughputIn": 0.0,
  "msgThroughputOut": 0.0,
  "publishers": [
    {
      "address": "/172.17.0.1:35048",
      "averageMsgSize": 0.0,
      "clientVersion": "1.19.0-incubating",
      "connectedSince": "2017-08-09 20:59:34.621+0000",
      "msgRateIn": 0.0,
      "msgThroughputIn": 0.0,
      "producerId": 0,
      "producerName": "standalone-0-1"
    }
  ],
  "replication": {},
  "storageSize": 16,
  "subscriptions": {
    "my-sub": {
      "blockedSubscriptionOnUnackedMsgs": false,
      "consumers": [
        {
          "address": "/172.17.0.1:35064",
          "availablePermits": 996,
          "blockedConsumerOnUnackedMsgs": false,
          "clientVersion": "1.19.0-incubating",
          "connectedSince": "2017-08-09 21:05:39.222+0000",
          "consumerName": "166111",
          "msgRateOut": 0.0,
          "msgRateRedeliver": 0.0,
          "msgThroughputOut": 0.0,
          "unackedMessages": 0
        }
      ],
      "msgBacklog": 0,
      "msgRateExpired": 0.0,
      "msgRateOut": 0.0,
      "msgRateRedeliver": 0.0,
      "msgThroughputOut": 0.0,
      "type": "Exclusive",
      "unackedMessages": 0
    }
  }
}