Red Hat and CentOS

Fluent Bit is distributed as the fluent-bit package and is available for the latest stable CentOS system.

Fluent Bit supports the following architectures:

• x86_64

• aarch64

• arm64v8

For CentOS 9 and later, Fluent Bit uses CentOS Stream as the canonical base system.

The recommended secure deployment approach is to use the following instructions:

CentOS 8

CentOS 8 is now end-of-life, so the default Yum repositories are unavailable.

Ensure you've configured an appropriate mirror. For example:

$ sed -i 's/mirrorlist/#mirrorlist/g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-* && \

$ sed -i 's|#baseurl=http://mirror.centos.org|baseurl=http://vault.centos.org|g' /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-*

An alternative is to use Rocky or Alma Linux, which should be equivalent.

RHEL, AlmaLinux, RockyLinux, and CentOS 9 Stream

From CentOS 9 Stream and later, the CentOS dependencies will update more often than downstream usage. This might mean that incompatible (more recent) versions are provided of certain dependencies (for example, OpenSSL). For OSS, Fluent Bit also provide RockyLinux and AlmaLinux repositories.

Replace the centos string in Yum configuration with almalinux or rockylinux to use those repositories instead. This might be required for RHEL 9 as well which will no longer track equivalent CentOS 9 stream dependencies. No RHEL 9 build is provided, as it's expected you're using one of the OSS variants listed.

Configure YUM

Thefluent-bit package is provided through a Yum repository. To add the repository reference to your system:

1. In /etc/yum.repos.d/, add a new file called fluent-bit.repo.

2. Add the following content to the file:

   [fluent-bit]
     name = Fluent Bit
     baseurl = https://packages.fluentbit.io/centos/$releasever/
     gpgcheck=1
     gpgkey=https://packages.fluentbit.io/fluentbit.key
     repo_gpgcheck=1
     enabled=1

3. As a best practice, enable gpgcheck and repo_gpgcheck for security reasons. Fluent Bit signs its repository metadata and all Fluent Bit packages.

Install

1. Ensure your GPG key is up to date.

2. After your repository is configured, run the following command to install it:

   sudo yum install fluent-bit

3. Instruct Systemd to enable the service:

   sudo systemctl start fluent-bit

If you do a status check, you should see a similar output like this:

$ systemctl status fluent-bit

● fluent-bit.service - Fluent Bit
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/fluent-bit.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: active (running) since Thu 2016-07-07 02:08:01 BST; 9s ago
 Main PID: 3820 (fluent-bit)
   CGroup: /system.slice/fluent-bit.service
           └─3820 /opt/fluent-bit/bin/fluent-bit -c etc/fluent-bit/fluent-bit.conf
...

The default Fluent Bit configuration collect metrics of CPU usage and sends the records to the standard output. You can see the outgoing data in your /var/log/messages file.

FAQ

Yum install fails with a 404 - Page not found error for the package mirror

The fluent-bit.repo file for the latest installations of Fluent Bit uses a $releasever variable to determine the correct version of the package to install to your system:

[fluent-bit]
  name = Fluent Bit
  baseurl = https://packages.fluentbit.io/centos/$releasever/$basearch/

Depending on your Red Hat distribution version, this variable can return a value other than the OS major release version (for example, RHEL7 Server distributions return 7Server instead of 7). The Fluent Bit package URL uses the major OS release version, so any other value here will cause a 404.

To resolve this issue, replace the $releasever variable with your system's OS major release version. For example:

[fluent-bit]
  name = Fluent Bit
  baseurl = https://packages.fluentbit.io/centos/7/$basearch/
  gpgcheck=1
  gpgkey=https://packages.fluentbit.io/fluentbit.key
  repo_gpgcheck=1
  enabled=1

Yum install fails with incompatible dependencies using CentOS 9+

CentOS 9 and later will no longer be compatible with RHEL 9 as it might track more recent dependencies. Alternative AlmaLinux and RockyLinux repositories are available.

See the previous guidance.