Installing Fluentd from Source

This article explains how to install Fluentd from source code (git repository). This is useful for developers.

Step-1: Install Ruby interpreter

Please install Ruby >= 1.9.3 and bundler on your local environment.

Step-2: Fetch Source Code

Fetch the source code from github. The official repository is located here.

$ git clone https://github.com/fluent/fluentd.git
$ cd fluentd
$ git checkout -b v0.12 origin/v0.12

master branch is now for v0.14 development so you need to checkout v0.12 branch.

Step-3: Build and Install

Build the package with rake and install it with gem.

$ bundle install
Fetching gem metadata from https://rubygems.org/.........
...
Your bundle is complete!
Use `bundle show [gemname]` to see where a bundled gem is installed.
$ bundle exec rake build
fluentd xxx built to pkg/fluentd-xxx.gem.
$ gem install pkg/fluentd-xxx.gem

Step-4: Run

Run the following commands to to confirm that Fluentd was installed successfully:

$ fluentd --setup ./fluent
$ fluentd -c ./fluent/fluent.conf -vv &
$ echo '{"json":"message"}' | fluent-cat debug.test

The last command sends Fluentd a message ‘{“json”:”message”}’ with a “debug.test” tag. If the installation was successful, Fluentd will output the following message:

2011-07-10 16:49:50 +0900 debug.test: {"json":"message"}

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

If this article is incorrect or outdated, or omits critical information, please let us know.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), originally invented by Treasure Data, Inc. All components are available under the Apache 2 License.