Includes all processors through release 0.7.0

I looked around at what can be done with Apache NiFi and didn’t notice a list of processors without looking at the code or building the project. I think a list of available processors, the work horse of Apache Nifi, would greatly help decide if it is right for certain needs. So, I went into the usage guide in the Apache Nifi UI and pulled a list of processors and a quick description for those who want to know what possibilities there are before getting into nifi itself!

List of processors

With new releases of Nifi, the number of processors have increased from the original 53 to 154! Here is a list of all 154 processors, listed alphabetically, that are currently in Apache Nifi as of the most rescent release. Each one links to a description of the processor further down. The Usage documentation available in the web ui has much more detail about each processor, it’s properties, modifiable attributes, and relationships and each processor has it’s own page in the UI, so here is just a quick overview. Again, this content is taken directly from Nifi’s Usage guide in their web UI and all credit/rights belong to them under the Apache 2.0 License.

Nifi has improved their documentation, which was originally only available when running apache nifi. The documentation now is produced through the build process and has been added to their website. So if you need more information or more detail about each processor just check there.

Apache Nifi just had their first release, 0.0.1. It showed good movement forward with 75 bug fixes, 24 improvements, and 2 new features. A list of Release Notes is on their Jira page. With the release, it gives the users source downloads to start from, which is great, but lets look at the highlights of this release.

Apache Nifi Release 0.0.1 Highlights

• One of the biggest changes was the directory structure to allow parrallel maven builds. This took the build time down from 20-30 minutes to 3-7 minutes. Nifi Jira 169
• The improvement of the assembly process also allowed for more stream lined packaging. Nifi Jira 228

Outside of the build process, most of the updates were cleaning up the code base to make it more developer friendly and fixing alot of small bugs;

• Updating libraries to their most current version
• Adding documentation/users guides
• Guarantee builds on varying OSes: OSX, Linux, Windows.

I’m pretty excited to see what’s in the next release, but also excited that I don’t have to build nifi to use it. Release binaries are available on the nifi website.

The main user interface of Apache Nifi is their web ui. This makes it much more enjoyable to use than a command line interface, but can still be hard to grasp quickly or know where certain things are when you first start using it. To help reduce the learning curve, we are going through and breaking down the web ui through a video showing how-to navigate Apache Nifi.

Our main points will be the menu bar and building a data flow with some tips and tricks along the way. The data flow will be based off of our previous post Getting Started with Apache Nifi.

• Update April 8th 2015: The Vagrantfile has been updated to pull the release tag 0.0.2 for stability

Install options

Apache NiFi is currently in incubation and so does not have any releases, so to start we have to checkout the project and build the code base. A users guide is avaialble on the nifi website with requirements for building and running nifi, mainly java 7 and maven 3.0.5+. OpendJDK will work but currently the unit tests will not pass. A quick tldr; can be found below.

Using Vagrant

If you like to keep your project dependencies seperate like me, I’ve created a Vagrantfile that will get all dependencies and then build the project in the shared /vagrant/ folder. After building it will start nifi and you can point your browser to localhost:8080/nifi/ and skip to Building a Simple Dataflow. The provisioning of the VM will take about 10-15 minutes depending on your hardware.