Deployment Quickstart
The quickest way to get up and running with Gaffer is through its container
images. To start up a simple map store based instance with some default schemas
simply pull and run the gaffer-rest image.
The Swagger REST API should be available at http://127.0.0.1:8080/rest to try out.
Be aware that as the image uses the map store backend by default, all graph data will be saved in memory so killing the container will mean you will lose any data added to the graph. Take a look at the possible storage options section for an overview of the different store types Gaffer supports.
If you wish to add custom schema to try out you can mount these into the
container at start up to configure the graph. By default the gaffer-rest image
looks under /gaffer/schema meaning you can bind-mount over this directory with
a directory containing your custom schema.
Info
A simple map store based deployment is usually only useful for small scale graphs and rapid prototyping; please see the subsequent pages in this section for more scalable deployments.
Possible Storage Options
As Gaffer essentially works as a framework to structure and save data into a data store, the storage option is one of the largest considerations when deploying a new graph. A few technologies are supported by Gaffer; however, some are more widely used than others, the main types you might want to use are:
- Accumulo Store - The main recommended data store for Gaffer implemented by Apache Accumulo.
- Map Store - In memory JVM store, useful for quick prototyping.
- Proxy Store - This provides a way to hook into an existing Gaffer store, when used all operations are delegated to the chosen Gaffer REST API.
- Federated Store - Similar to a proxy store however, this will forward all requests to a collection of sub graphs but merge the responses so they appear as one graph.
Once the storage option has been chosen, the deployment can be setup and started using one or more of the available Gaffer container images.
Info
Please see the gaffer stores documentation for more information on the available store types.
To change the storage backend for Gaffer the store.properties file can be
configured with the chosen type. Various other properties and configuration are
available and covered in the Gaffer configuration section.
Example store.properties for MapStore
Created: October 6, 2023