Installing Fluentd from Source

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

Install Ruby interpreter

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

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

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

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"}

NOTE: It's HIGHLY recommended that you set up ntpd on the node to prevent invalid timestamps in your logs.

NOTE: For large deployments, you must use jemalloc to avoid memory fragmentation. This is already included in the rpm and deb packages.