Tutorial: Building a new flow from scratch

If you are new to flow design and have never used NiFi before, this tutorial is for you. Learn how to build a draft adding and configuring components, connecting them, creating Controller Services, and testing your flow while creating it.

This tutorial walks you through the creation of a simple flow design that retrieves the latest changes from Wikipedia through invoking the Wikipedia API. It converts JSON events to Avro, before filtering and routing them to two different processors which merge events together before a file is written to local disk.

You will learn about:

  • Creating a draft
  • Creating a Controller Service
  • Adding processors to your draft
  • Configuring processors
  • Adding a user-defined property to a processor configuration
  • Connecting processors to create relationships between them
  • Running a Test Session
  • Publishing a draft to the Catalog as a flow definition.

The flow you are about to build can be deployed without any external dependencies and does not require any parameter values during deployment. Still, there are prerequisites you have to meet before you can start building your first draft.

  • You have an enabled and healthy CDF environment.

  • You have been assigned the DFDeveloper role granting you access to the Flow Designer.

  • You have been assigned the DFCatalogAdmin or DFCatalogViewer role granting you access to the Catalog. You will need this authorization to publish your draft as a flow definition to the Catalog.

  • You have been assigned the DFFlowAdmin role for the environment to which you want to deploy the flow definition.