configuration.md

Configuration

A Benthos stream is configured either in a YAML or JSON file using a hierarchical format. For a basic stream pipeline that means the section for, say, an input is very simple:

input:
  type: kafka
  kafka:
    topic: foo
    partition: 0
    addresses:
      - localhost:9092

However, as configurations become more complex this format can sometimes be difficult to read and manage:

input:
  type: kafka
  kafka:
    ...
  processors:
    - type: conditional
      conditional:
        condition:
          type: jmespath
          jmespath:
            query: contains(foo.bar, "compress me")
        processors:
          - type: compress
            compress:
              algorithm: gzip

The above example reads messages from Kafka and, if the JSON path foo.bar contains the phrase "compress me" the entire message will be compressed with gzip, otherwise it passes unchanged.

Allowing arbitrary hierarchies of processors and conditions like this is powerful, but increases the likelihood of issues being introduced by typos.

This document outlines tooling provided by Benthos to help with writing and managing these more complex configuration files.

Contents

• Enabling Discovery
• Help With Debugging

Enabling Discovery

The discoverability of configuration fields is a common headache with any configuration driven application. The classic solution is to provide curated documentation that is often hosted on a dedicated site. Benthos does this by generating a markdown document per configuration section.

However, a user often only needs to get their hands on a short, runnable example config file for their use case. They just need to see the format and field names as the fields themselves are usually self explanatory. Forcing such a user to navigate a website, scrolling through paragraphs of text, seems inefficient when all they actually needed to see was something like:

input:
  type: amqp
  amqp:
    url: amqp://guest:guest@localhost:5672/
    consumer_tag: benthos-consumer
    exchange: benthos-exchange
    exchange_type: direct
    key: benthos-key
    prefetch_count: 10
    prefetch_size: 0
    queue: benthos-queue
output:
  type: stdout

In order to make this process easier Benthos is able to generate usable configuration examples for any types, and you can do this from the binary using the --example flag in combination with --print-yaml or --print-json. If, for example, we wanted to generate a config with a websocket input, a Kafka output and a JMESPath processor in the middle, we could do it with the following command:

benthos --print-yaml --example websocket,kafka,jmespath

There are also examples within the config directory, where there is a config file for each input and output type, and inside the processors subdirectory there is a file showing each processor type, and so on.

All of these generated configuration examples also include other useful config sections such as metrics, logging, etc with sensible defaults.

Printing Every Field

The format of a Benthos config file naturally exposes all of the options for a section when it's printed with all default values. For example, in a fictional section foo, which has type options bar, baz and qux, if you were to print the entire default foo section of a config it would look something like this:

foo:
  type: bar
  bar:
    field1: default_value
    field2: 2
  baz:
    field3: another_default_value
  qux:
    field4: false

Which tells you that section foo supports the three object types bar, baz and qux, and defaults to type bar. It also shows you the fields that each section has, and their default values.

The Benthos binary is able to print a JSON or YAML config file containing every section in this format with the commands benthos --print-yaml --all and benthos --print-json --all. This can be extremely useful for quick and dirty config discovery when the full repo isn't at hand.

As a user you could create a new config file with:

benthos --print-yaml --all > conf.yaml

And simply delete all lines for sections you aren't interested in, then you are left with the full set of fields you want.

Alternatively, using tools such as jq you can extract specific type fields:

# Get a list of all input types:
benthos --print-json --all | jq '.input | keys'

# Get all Kafka input fields:
benthos --print-json --all | jq '.input.kafka'

# Get all AMQP output fields:
benthos --print-json --all | jq '.output.amqp'

# Get a list of all processor types:
benthos --print-json --all | jq '.pipeline.processors[0] | keys'

# Get all JSON processor fields:
benthos --print-json --all | jq '.pipeline.processors[0].json'

Help With Debugging

Once you have a config written you now move onto the next headache of proving that it works, and understanding why it doesn't. Benthos, like most good config driven services, performs validation on configs and tries to provide sensible error messages.

However, with validation it can be hard to capture all problems, and the user usually understands their intentions better than the service. In order to help expose and diagnose config errors Benthos can echo back your configuration after it has been parsed.

Echoing is done with the --print-yaml and --print-json commands, which print the Benthos configuration in YAML and JSON format respectively. Since this is done after parsing and applying your config it is able to show you exactly how your config was interpretted:

benthos -c ./your-config.yaml --print-yaml

You can check the output of the above command to see if certain sections are missing or fields are incorrect, which allows you to pinpoint typos in the config.

If your configuration is complex, and the behaviour that you notice implies a certain section is at fault, then you can drill down into that section by using tools such as jq:

# Check the second processor config
benthos -c ./your-config.yaml --print-json | jq '.pipeline.processors[1]'

# Check the condition of a filter processor
benthos -c ./your-config.yaml --print-json | jq '.pipeline.processors[0].filter'