In this post I will outline the steps necessary to use Accumulo and Gora to store content retrieved by Nutch.
###Apache Accumulo
For those of you unfamiliar with Accumulo, it is an incubating Apache project and …
“Accumulo is a sorted, distributed key/value store based on Google’s BigTable design. It is built on top of Apache Hadoop, Zookeeper, and Thrift. It features a few novel improvements on the BigTable design in the form of cell-level access labels and a server-side programming mechanism that can modify key/value pairs at various points in the data management process.”
Accumulo is conceptually very similar to HBase, but it has some nice features that HBase is currently lacking. Some of these features are:
Cell level security
No fat row problem - i.e. entire rows don’t need to fit in RAM
No limitation on Column Families or when Column Families can be created
Server side, data local, programming abstraction called Iterators. Iterators are incredibly useful for adding functionality to Tablet Servers such as data local filtering, aggregation, and search.
Gora is a object relational/non-relational mapping for arbitrary data stores including both relational (MySQL) and non-relational data stores (HBase, Cassandra, Accumulo, etc). It was designed for Big Data applications and has support (interfaces) for Apache Pig, Apache Hive, Cascading, and generic Map/Reduce.
Apache Nutch
Nutch is a highly scalable web crawler built over Hadoop Map/Reduce. It was designed from the ground up to be an Internet scale web crawler. This is a great overview of Nutch’s architecture: Nutch as a Web Data Mining Platform
###Accumulo + Nutch + Gora
I generally prefer git over svn, in this post I use the source code hosted on github.
####1. Obtain all sources (and Accumulo patch for GORA)
####2. Configure and Build Each Project:
#####Standard build and maven install for accumulo
#####Patching GORA for Accumulo Support
Gora needs to be patched for support for Accumulo. This patch should be considered beta, but I found it works good enough for experimenting with Nutch/GORA. Note:
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-DskipTests
is used because some of the tests seemed to hang indefinitely, so I skipped them for now.
#####Building Nutch/GORA
So, getting Nutch/GORA to build was a bit of a challenge. I will outline some of the hoops I had to jump through. File paths mentioned below are assuming you are in the nutch project directory.
Run the following commands to checkout the nutchgora branch of Nutch.
Modify the
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ivy/ivy.xml
file. Change gora-core and gora-sql dependencies rev from
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"0.1.1-incubating"
to
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"0.2-SNAPSHOT"
. This is to match the patched version we just installed. Also, add the following lines:
Modify the
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ivy/ivysettings.xml
file. Add the following line to the top of the
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<resolvers>
section. This will configure ant/ivy to use your local maven repository when resolving dependencies. This is necessary because the patched version of GORA and the latest Accumulo version are not in any public maven repos.
Create the file conf/gora-accumulo-mapping.xml with the following contents:
Edit conf/gora.properties and add the following lines:
edit (or create) conf/nutch-site.xml and adding the following property setting to it
edit $HOME/.ivy2/cache/jaxen/jaxen/ivy-1.1.3.xml and find and comment out the following lines. If anyone knows a more elegant way to accomplish this please let me know.
If I don't comment out those dependencies, I get this error during compilation:
Run the following commands:
####3. Deploy and Run
#####Configure Accumulo and its Dependencies
For this post I am only going to cover the basics for getting these systems to run on a single machine. Deploying and running over a cluster may be covered in another post.
######Configure and Start Hadoop
Add the following to
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hadoop-0.20.2/conf/core-site.xml
Add the following to
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hadoop-0.20.2/conf/mapred-site.xml
Set the JAVA_HOME variable in
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hadoop-0.20.2/conf/hadoop-env.sh
. Here is an example from my system:
At this point, you should have a bare bones configured hadoop installation. It is time to start it…
Run the following commands:
If you configured everything properly, you should be able to open http://127.0.0.1:50070/dfshealth.jsp in a web browser and see a page that looks like this. If there is a message saying that the Namenode is in safe mode, wait a minute or two and refresh the page. It should go away.
You should also be able to open http://127.0.0.1:50030/jobtracker.jsp in a web browser and see a page that looks like this:
In both of these status webpages you should be able to see a
1
1
listed after
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"Live Nodes"
and
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"Nodes"
respectively.
######Configure and Start Zookeeper
Add the following to
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zookeeper-3.4.3/conf/zoo.cfg
. Create this file if it does not exist. NOTE: replace
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_USERNAME_
with your username.
Edit bin/zkEnv.sh. Right after the following lines.
Add this line:
At this point, you should have a configured zookeeper installation, it’s time to start it…
If you configured zookeeper and it successfully started you should be able to run the following command:
It will output a bunch of logging messages, this is fine. Press
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<ENTER>
, and then you should be dropped into a shell this a prompt that looks like the following:
Type
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ls /
and then
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<ENTER>
. You should see a single line of output (followed again by a prompt) that looks like the following:
If so, then zookeeper is configured and running properly. When you first run the zkCli.sh command, if you see stack traces that look like this:
Then it means zookeeper failed to start for some reason, isn’t listening on 127.0.0.1:2181, or you may have a local firewall blocking access to that port.
######Configure and Start Accumulo
Edit
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accumulo-env.sh
. At the top of the file, define HADOOP_HOME, ZOOKEEPER_HOME, and JAVA_HOME. Here is an example:
Edit
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accumulo-site.xml
.
Set the
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logger.dir.walog
property.
Set the
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instance.secret
property.
Run the following commands:
At this point you should have a fully configured Accumulo installation. It is time to initialize it and start it…
You should see similar output to this. I set my instance name to
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"inst"
and my password to
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"secret"
. You may want to do the same for the sake of this tutorial or make sure to set the correct config parameters later.
Note: If it appears to hang after you entered the instance name, zookeeper may not be running.
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<CTRL>-C
the accumulo init and make sure zookeeper is running.
Now run:
After this finishes, you should be able to open http://127.0.0.1:50095/ in a web browser and see a page very similar to this:
The important items to note on this page are the is a 1 after the Tablet Servers, Live Data Nodes, and Trackers in the “Accumulo Master”, “NameNode”, and “JobTracker” tables, respectively. There should also be entry in the “Zookeeper” table.
###4. Crawl
At this point, you should have a fully functional Hadoop, Zookeeper, and Accumulo install, so we are ready to run a Nutch web crawl. Create a file with URLs, one per line, call it seeds.txt and place it in your home directory. I added the following URLs to my seeds file:
Run the following commands:
You should see some log messages printed to the console, but hopefully no stack traces. If you see a stack trace, you may need to go back and check your configs to make sure they match the ones we created earlier.
After the crawler finishes, you should be able to explore it using the accumulo shell.
Further details and exploration of this data in Accumulo will have to wait for another blog post.
I ended up posting all the modified code from Gora (accumulo patch) and Nutchgora (patches for getting gora-accumulo working) to my github. Check it out.
Update (3/2): someone told me that they had problems getting nutch to build and that this patch worked for them (even though the patch is for GORA). I would be curious if anyone else has this same issue. Here is the error they encountered when building with