Start a standalone cluster with Docker

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

If you have not installed Docker, download it following 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

Under Windows, you should use something like the following docker command:

$ docker run -it \
  -p 6650:6650 \
  -p 8080:8080 \
  -v "$PWD/data:/pulsar/data".ToLower() \
  apachepulsar/pulsar:{{site.current_version}} \
  bin/pulsar standalone

A few things to note about this command:

• $PWD/data : The docker host directory under the Windows operating system must be lowercase.$PWD/data can provide you with the specified directory, for example: E:/data.
• -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.

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
...

Automatically created namespace

When you start a local standalone cluster, Pulsar will automatically create a public/default 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, Go, Python and C++. If you're running a local 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('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('my-topic')

for i in range(10):
    producer.send(('hello-pulsar-%d' % i).encode('utf-8'))

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/v2/persistent/public/default/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
    }
  }
}