Install By Dmg

This article explains how to install td-agent, the stable Fluentd distribution package maintained by Treasure Data, Inc, on MacOS X.

What is td-agent?

Fluentd is written in Ruby for flexibility, with performance sensitive parts written in C. However, casual users may have difficulty installing and operating a Ruby daemon.

That's why Treasure Data, Inc is providing the stable distribution of Fluentd, called td-agent. The differences between Fluentd and td-agent can be found here.

For MacOS X, we're using the OS native .dmg Installer to distribute td-agent.

Step1: Install td-agent

Please download the .dmg file from here, and install the software.

Step2: Launch td-agent

You can launch td-agent with launchctl command. Please make sure the daemon started correctly from the log (/var/log/td-agent/td-agent.log).

$ sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/td-agent.plist
$ less /var/log/td-agent/td-agent.log
2013-04-19 16:55:03 -0700 [info]: starting fluentd-0.10.33
2013-04-19 16:55:03 -0700 [info]: reading config file path="/etc/td-agent/td-agent.conf"

Your configuration file is located at /etc/td-agent/td-agent.conf. Your plugin directory is at /etc/td-agent/plugin. In case you want to stop the agent, please execute the command below.

$ sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/td-agent.plist

Step3: Post Sample Logs via HTTP

By default, /etc/td-agent/td-agent.conf is configured to take logs from HTTP and route them to stdout (/var/log/td-agent/td-agent.log). You can post sample log records using the curl command.

$ curl -X POST -d 'json={"json":"message"}' http://localhost:8888/debug.test
$ tail -n 1 /var/log/td-agent/td-agent.log
2013-04-19 16:51:47 -0700 debug.test: {"json":"message"}

Uninstall td-agent

td-agent for Mac doesn't provide uninstallation app unlike rpm / deb. If you want to uninstall td-agent from your Mac, remove these files / directories.

  • /Library/LaunchDaemons/td-agent.plist

  • /etc/td-agent

  • /opt/td-agent

  • /var/log/td-agent

Next Steps

You're now ready to collect your real logs using Fluentd. Please see the following tutorials to learn how to collect your data from various data sources.

Please refer to the resources below for further steps.

If this article is incorrect or outdated, or omits critical information, please let us know. Fluentd is a open source project under Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). All components are available under the Apache 2 License.

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