FAQs

Q: Where can I find information about upgrading to a new NiFi version?

• A: We are still need to put together a real upgrade guide; however, in the meantime, there are some notes on upgrading in the System Properties section of the Administrator Guide. These tips have to do with setting up your current NiFi in such a way that will make upgrading easier.

Q: ListenHTTP -

I have built most of our production flow in NiFi. Part of the data is received from thousands of distributed components via the ListenHTTP processor. I now need to add some automatic registration for these components (this assigns some ID to the component) and enable authentication using the generated ID. Is this possible to implement with the current version? The registration could happen outside (maybe using Play), but the file reception should happen in NiFi in order to initiate the flow.

• A: The ListenHTTP processor isn't so general purpose as to support custom designed authentication and authorization schemes. You could use it to restrict who can provide data through use of HTTPS and specific certificate DN patterns or to simply accept whatever data is brought in and then have a follow-on processor in the flow choose to drop data or not because it knows and trusts the source though. If you want to be able to block data as a client component tries to feed it to NiFi using a custom scheme, then you'll probably want to look at a custom processor or wire together the HandleHttpRequest and HandleHttpResponse processors. With those you can build a rather custom and powerful API/interface and have it support your own chosen authentication and authorization scheme on top of HTTP/S. With those processors if you understand HTTP well you can basically visually construct a web service. It requires the user to have a lot of knowledge to get the most of out it though.

Q: If I have FlowFiles stuck in my queue, how can I clear them out?

• A: If you are testing a flow and do not care about what happens to the test data that is stuck in a connection queue, you can reconfigure the connection and temporarily set the FlowFile Expiration to something like 1 sec so that the FlowFiles currently in the queue will expire. Then, you can reset it to 0 sec (which means never expire). Note that you must stop both processors on either side of a connection before you can edit the settings.

Please add questions about process groups here.

Please add questions about remote process groups/site-to-site here.

Q: I am evaluating NiFi for a large project to see if NiFi would fit as the main data collector. The project I am working on would require retrieving several hundreds of millions of files per day (hundreds of TB per day) so my first question is how to achieve distribution/clustering with NiFi, if that's possible.

• A: The NiFi Administrator Guide includes a quick explanation of our clustering capabilities and example configurations. This would be a great place to start and become familiar with NiFi clustering.

Please add questions about controller services here.

Please add questions about reporting tasks here.