Alright, so I wanted to mess around with Burrow, and I needed to get it running quickly without a ton of setup. I figured the easiest way would be to just fire it up in a Docker container. Here’s how I did it.
First, I pulled the official Burrow image. Nothing fancy here, just a simple command:
docker pull linkedin/burrow
That grabbed the latest version. I didn’t bother with specifying a tag, because I just wanted to play with it, not deploy it for production or anything.
Next, I needed a configuration file. I’m not a Burrow expert, so I just grabbed the example configuration from the Burrow GitHub repository. I saved it as in a local directory.
Running the Container
With the image and configuration in place, I ran the container. Here is my docker run command:
docker run -d --name burrow -p 8000:8000 -v $(pwd)/*:/etc/burrow/* linkedin/burrow
Let’s break that down:
-d: This runs the container in detached mode, so it runs in the background.--name burrow: I named the container “burrow” so I could easily refer to it later.-p 8000:8000: This maps port 8000 on my local machine to port 8000 inside the container. Burrow’s web UI runs on port 8000, so this lets me access it from my browser.-v $(pwd)/*:/etc/burrow/*: This is the important part. It mounts my local file into the container at/etc/burrow/*. This is where Burrow expects to find its configuration. The$(pwd)part just gets the current directory, so make sure you run the command from the directory where you saved .linkedin/burrow: This specifies the image to use, which I just pulled.
After that, I just opened my browser and went to localhost:8000, and there it was! The Burrow UI, up and running. I could start configuring it to monitor my Kafka clusters, but that’s a story for another day. This was just about getting it up and running with minimal fuss.
It is done!
