ZooKeeper Getting Started Guide

This document contains information to get you started quickly with ZooKeeper. It is aimed primarily at developers hoping to try it out, and contains simple installation instructions for a single ZooKeeper server, a few commands to verify that it is running, and a simple programming example. Finally, as a convenience, there are a few sections regarding more complicated installations, for example running replicated deployments, and optimizing the transaction log. However for the complete instructions for commercial deployments, please refer to the ZooKeeper Administrator's Guide.

Pre-requisites

See System Requirements in the Admin guide.

Download

To get a ZooKeeper distribution, download a recent stable release from one of the Apache Download Mirrors.

Standalone Operation

Setting up a ZooKeeper server in standalone mode is straightforward. The server is contained in a single JAR file, so installation consists of creating a configuration.

Once you've downloaded a stable ZooKeeper release unpack it and cd to the root

To start ZooKeeper you need a configuration file. Here is a sample, create it in conf/zoo.cfg:

tickTime=2000
dataDir=/var/zookeeper
clientPort=2181

This file can be called anything, but for the sake of this discussion call it conf/zoo.cfg. Change the value of dataDir to specify an existing (empty to start with) directory. Here are the meanings for each of the fields:

tickTime

the basic time unit in milliseconds used by ZooKeeper. It is used to do heartbeats and the minimum session timeout will be twice the tickTime.

dataDir

the location to store the in-memory database snapshots and, unless specified otherwise, the transaction log of updates to the database.

clientPort

the port to listen for client connections

Now that you created the configuration file, you can start ZooKeeper:

bin/zkServer.sh start

ZooKeeper logs messages using log4j -- more detail available in the Logging section of the Programmer's Guide. You will see log messages coming to the console (default) and/or a log file depending on the log4j configuration.

The steps outlined here run ZooKeeper in standalone mode. There is no replication, so if ZooKeeper process fails, the service will go down. This is fine for most development situations, but to run ZooKeeper in replicated mode, please see Running Replicated ZooKeeper.

Managing ZooKeeper Storage

For long running production systems ZooKeeper storage must be managed externally (dataDir and logs). See the section on maintenance for more details.

Connecting to ZooKeeper

Once ZooKeeper is running, you have several options for connection to it:

• Java: Use

  bin/zkCli.sh 127.0.0.1:2181

  This lets you perform simple, file-like operations.

• C: compile cli_mt (multi-threaded) or cli_st (single-threaded) by running make cli_mt or make cli_st in the src/c subdirectory in the ZooKeeper sources. See the README contained within src/c for full details.

  You can run the program from src/c using:

  LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. cli_mt 127.0.0.1:2181

  or

  LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. cli_st 127.0.0.1:2181

  This will give you a simple shell to execute file system like operations on ZooKeeper.

Programming to ZooKeeper

ZooKeeper has a Java bindings and C bindings. They are functionally equivalent. The C bindings exist in two variants: single threaded and multi-threaded. These differ only in how the messaging loop is done. For more information, see the Programming Examples in the ZooKeeper Programmer's Guide for sample code using of the different APIs.

Running Replicated ZooKeeper

Running ZooKeeper in standalone mode is convenient for evaluation, some development, and testing. But in production, you should run ZooKeeper in replicated mode. A replicated group of servers in the same application is called a quorum, and in replicated mode, all servers in the quorum have copies of the same configuration file. The file is similar to the one used in standalone mode, but with a few differences. Here is an example:

tickTime=2000
dataDir=/var/zookeeper
clientPort=2181
initLimit=5
syncLimit=2
server.1=zoo1:2888:3888
server.2=zoo2:2888:3888
server.3=zoo3:2888:3888

The new entry, initLimit is timeouts ZooKeeper uses to limit the length of time the ZooKeeper servers in quorum have to connect to a leader. The entry syncLimit limits how far out of date a server can be from a leader.

With both of these timeouts, you specify the unit of time using tickTime. In this example, the timeout for initLimit is 5 ticks at 2000 milleseconds a tick, or 10 seconds.

The entries of the form server.X list the servers that make up the ZooKeeper service. When the server starts up, it knows which server it is by looking for the file myid in the data directory. That file has the contains the server number, in ASCII.

Finally, note the two port numbers after each server name: " 2888" and "3888". Peers use the former port to connect to other peers. Such a connection is necessary so that peers can communicate, for example, to agree upon the order of updates. More specifically, a ZooKeeper server uses this port to connect followers to the leader. When a new leader arises, a follower opens a TCP connection to the leader using this port. Because the default leader election also uses TCP, we currently require another port for leader election. This is the second port in the server entry.

Other Optimizations

There are a couple of other configuration parameters that can greatly increase performance:

• To get low latencies on updates it is important to have a dedicated transaction log directory. By default transaction logs are put in the same directory as the data snapshots and myid file. The dataLogDir parameters indicates a different directory to use for the transaction logs.

• [tbd: what is the other config param?]