h1. Welcome to Apache Flume!

Apache Flume is a distributed, reliable, and available service for efficiently
collecting, aggregating, and moving large amounts of log data. It has a simple
and flexible architecture based on streaming data flows. It is robust and fault
tolerant with tunable reliability mechanisms and many failover and recovery
mechanisms. The system is centrally managed and allows for intelligent dynamic
management. It uses a simple extensible data model that allows for online
analytic application.

The Apache Flume 1.x (NG) code line is a refactoring of the first generation
Flume to solve certain known issues and limitations of the original design.

Apache Flume is open-sourced under the Apache Software Foundation License v2.0.

h2. Documentation

Documentation is included in the binary distribution under the docs directory.
In source form, it can be found in the flume-ng-doc directory.

The Flume 1.x guide and FAQ are available here:

* https://cwiki.apache.org/FLUME/flume-ng.html
* https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLUME/Getting+Started

h2. Contact us!

* Mailing lists: https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FLUME/Mailing+Lists
* IRC channel #flume on irc.freenode.net

Bug and Issue tracker.

* https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/FLUME

h2. Compiling Flume

Compiling Flume requires the following tools:

* Oracle Java JDK 1.6
* Apache Maven 3.x

Note: The Apache Flume build requires more memory than the default configuration.
We recommend you set the following Maven options:

export MAVEN_OPTS="-Xms512m -Xmx1024m -XX:PermSize=256m -XX:MaxPermSize=512m"

To compile Flume, run `mvn compile`.
To build a distribution, run `mvn install`.

The final Flume distribution artifacts will be in $project/flume-ng-dist/target/.


h2. Compiling Flume with MapR patches

Clone and checkout the "<flume-version>-mapr" tag or branch of the Apache Flume 
release version from the github (https://github.com/mapr/flume). For example,
if you want to compile Flume version 1.3.1, checkout the "1.3.1-mapr" tag.

$ mkdir flume-1.3.1-mapr
$ cd flume-1.3.1-mapr
$ git clone git@github.com/mapr/flume.git .
$ git checkout flume-1.3.1-mapr
$ mvn clean -DskipTests

The command line argument `-DskipTests` is optional and allows you to skip running 
the unit tests.


Using Flume artifacts in your Maven Project

Add the following dependency to your project's pom.xml
<dependency>
  <groupId>com.mapr.flume</groupId>
  <artifactId>flume</artifactId>
  <version>${mapr.flume.version}</version>
</dependency>