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Has anyone tried using a Apache NiFi on Raspberry Pi?

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Rising Star

Raspberry Pi is a very inexpensive system often hooked up to variety of sensors. It will be useful to use Raspberry Pi as the host for Apache NiFi to ingest and coordinate the data from sensors before transporting the stream to alerting system or persistent storage

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

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According to Joe W this was working. There are a few variants of RPI, so don't expect wonders, but it's absolutely possible for a scaled down instance with correct expectations.

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NiFi works on the Raspberry Pi without any custom configuration. Follow the normal "Getting Started" steps here. One thing to know is that the large number of standard NARs means "service nifi start" will take a long time (5-10 minutes) to complete. Once it is done, the web UI will function normally.

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Contributor

I doing the similar task but web UI is not functioning.

I have downloaded NIFI on to my Raspberry Pi 2 and run the ./nifi.sh start command (which is not returning prompt back, I waited for 10-15 mins, then after 1 enter click I get my terminal back to run other commands.). when I run "status" command it says NIFI is running currently.

However if I try to stop NIFI, I get "Waiting Apache Nifi to finish shutting down..." then "NIFI has not finished shutting down after 20 seconds. Killing process" and it stops. But web UI is not functioning. NO errors in logs.

Can some one please help with this.

Thanks,

Amar

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Contributor

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Hi @Amar ch, I didn't time it, but it takes somewhere from 15-30 minutes to fully start the NiFi process.

One of the first things NiFi does on startup is unpack all the NAR files in the lib directory to make them available as processors. If you want the service to start faster, you can remove NARs for processors you don't intend to use.

Even once the service is started, I've found the NCM will be very slow. For this reason, I would plan on developing a template on your laptop and importing it into your RaspberryPi NiFi instance rather than trying to build out the flow directly on the pi.

The stumbling block above aside, once the flow is defined and started, I have had 0 problems with it. Been monitoring WiFi traffic for several months without a blip, even after a few power outages. NiFi started back up and resumed working just fine.

Edit: The number of standard NARs has grown since my comment in December, hence the increase in startup time from 10-30 minutes 😃

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Contributor

Hello @Randy Gelhausen

Thanks for your information. Indeed it took 30-40 mins for Nifi Web ui to be functional, after excluding all the nar that aren't required for now.

I wan't to know if you are using nifi in the clustered environment?

Thanks,

Amar.

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Master Guru

I am going to try on my PineA64 which is a little beefier

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Rising Star

Was toying with having a go at this but came to the conclusion it wasn't worth the effort. I have lots of small processor based sensors like Arduino that are happily running MQTT. They all talk to a broker on a Pi.

Instead I just wrote a simple Python based MQTT to Kafka bridge and have the Pi publishing to a topic directly in HDP. Flume then sends the data to HDFS

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Master Guru

It worked on my raspberry pi 2 but it is a bit slow