This guide describes setup of a standalone HBase instance that uses the local filesystem. It leads you through creating a table, inserting rows via the HBase shell, and then cleaning up and shutting down your standalone HBase instance. The below exercise should take no more than ten minutes (not including download time).
Choose a download site from this list of Apache Download
Mirrors. Click on suggested top link. This will take you to a
mirror of HBase Releases. Click on the folder named
stable
and then download the file that ends in
.tar.gz
to your local filesystem; e.g.
hbase-0.90.4.tar.gz
.
Decompress and untar your download and then change into the unpacked directory.
$ tar xfz hbase-0.90.4.tar.gz $ cd hbase-0.90.4
At this point, you are ready to start HBase. But before starting
it, you might want to edit conf/hbase-site.xml
and
set the directory you want HBase to write to,
hbase.rootdir
.
<?xml version="1.0"?> <?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="configuration.xsl"?> <configuration> <property> <name>hbase.rootdir</name> <value>file:///DIRECTORY/hbase</value> </property> </configuration>
Replace DIRECTORY
in the above with a
path to a directory where you want HBase to store its data. By default,
hbase.rootdir
is set to
/tmp/hbase-${user.name}
which means you'll lose all
your data whenever your server reboots (Most operating systems clear
/tmp
on restart).
Now start HBase:
$ ./bin/start-hbase.sh starting Master, logging to logs/hbase-user-master-example.org.out
You should now have a running standalone HBase instance. In
standalone mode, HBase runs all daemons in the the one JVM; i.e. both
the HBase and ZooKeeper daemons. HBase logs can be found in the
logs
subdirectory. Check them out especially if
HBase had trouble starting.
All of the above presumes a 1.6 version of Oracle
java is installed on your machine and
available on your path; i.e. when you type
java, you see output that describes the
options the java program takes (HBase requires java 6). If this is not
the case, HBase will not start. Install java, edit
conf/hbase-env.sh
, uncommenting the
JAVA_HOME
line pointing it to your java install. Then,
retry the steps above.
Connect to your running HBase via the shell.
$ ./bin/hbase shell HBase Shell; enter 'help<RETURN>' for list of supported commands. Type "exit<RETURN>" to leave the HBase Shell Version: 0.90.0, r1001068, Fri Sep 24 13:55:42 PDT 2010 hbase(main):001:0>
Type help and then <RETURN> to see a listing of shell commands and options. Browse at least the paragraphs at the end of the help emission for the gist of how variables and command arguments are entered into the HBase shell; in particular note how table names, rows, and columns, etc., must be quoted.
Create a table named test
with a single column family named cf
.
Verify its creation by listing all tables and then insert some
values.
hbase(main):003:0> create 'test', 'cf' 0 row(s) in 1.2200 seconds hbase(main):003:0> list 'table' test 1 row(s) in 0.0550 seconds hbase(main):004:0> put 'test', 'row1', 'cf:a', 'value1' 0 row(s) in 0.0560 seconds hbase(main):005:0> put 'test', 'row2', 'cf:b', 'value2' 0 row(s) in 0.0370 seconds hbase(main):006:0> put 'test', 'row3', 'cf:c', 'value3' 0 row(s) in 0.0450 seconds
Above we inserted 3 values, one at a time. The first insert is at
row1
, column cf:a
with a value of
value1
. Columns in HBase are comprised of a column family prefix --
cf
in this example -- followed by a colon and then a
column qualifier suffix (a
in this case).
Verify the data insert.
Run a scan of the table by doing the following
hbase(main):007:0> scan 'test' ROW COLUMN+CELL row1 column=cf:a, timestamp=1288380727188, value=value1 row2 column=cf:b, timestamp=1288380738440, value=value2 row3 column=cf:c, timestamp=1288380747365, value=value3 3 row(s) in 0.0590 seconds
Get a single row as follows
hbase(main):008:0> get 'test', 'row1' COLUMN CELL cf:a timestamp=1288380727188, value=value1 1 row(s) in 0.0400 seconds
Now, disable and drop your table. This will clean up all done above.
hbase(main):012:0> disable 'test' 0 row(s) in 1.0930 seconds hbase(main):013:0> drop 'test' 0 row(s) in 0.0770 seconds
Exit the shell by typing exit.
hbase(main):014:0> exit
Stop your hbase instance by running the stop script.
$ ./bin/stop-hbase.sh stopping hbase...............
The above described standalone setup is good for testing and experiments only. Next move on to Section 1.3, “Not-so-quick Start Guide” where we'll go into depth on the different HBase run modes, requirements and critical configurations needed setting up a distributed HBase deploy.