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.

• ​Download​

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.

• Basic Configuration

  • ​Config File​

• Application Logs

  • ​Ruby, Java, Python, PHP,

    ​Perl, Node.js, Scala​

• Examples

  • ​Store Apache Log into Amazon S3​

  • ​Store Apache Log into MongoDB​

  • ​Data Collection into HDFS​

Please refer to the resources below for further steps.

• ​ChangeLog of td-agent​

• ​Chef Cookbook​

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.