This document is targeted to end users wishing to install zippylog on a system.

For details about the zippylog project, including why you may want to use it, visit the project wiki.

Additional, more technical documentation, is stored next to the code it describes in the doc/ directory of the Git repository.

To run, zippylog requires:

• Protocol Buffers 2.3.0 or later
• ZeroMQ 2.0.10 or later
• Lua 5.1 (or any distribution conforming to the C API)

To build zippylog and generate message classes, you'll need:

• Python 2.6 or later
• CMake (Linux)
• Visual Studio 2008 or later (Windows)

Instructions for installing zippylog are in the doc/ directory. See the various -development.md files.

Next, you'll need to create your domain-specific Protocol Buffer message definitions for the messages you wish to record.

Start by creating a directory to hold your definitions.

mkdir ~/zippylog-messages

cd ~/zippylog-messages

You'll create .proto files in this directory.

The directory structure in this directory determines the namespace of messages. The first directory level is the message namespace. This likely corresponds with your company or organization name. i.e. if you are the ACME company, you'll probably want to create an acme directory at the root.

Under your namespace directory, create additional directory layers as are necessary.

At any directory, create .proto files containing your message definitions. The name of the file will form a final namespace member.

For small organizations with limited amounts of message types, you may want a flat namespace:

• /acme/webapp.proto
• /acme/db.proto

Or, if there are many message types per application, you may wish to group them additionally:

• /acme/webapp/errors.proto
• /acme/webapp/billing.proto
• /acme/webapp/performance.proto

For larger organizations, you may wish to add some corporate hierarchy:

• /acme/operations/router_stats.proto
• /acme/operations/system_stats.proto
• /acme/sales/purchase_order.proto

The protocol buffer Language Guide is the definitive source for creating .proto files.

Once you have defined your messages, you'll need to run zippylog_compile to generate bindings to zippylog.

zippylog_compile ~/zippylog-messages ~/zippylog-generated

Like the message source directory, you'll likely want to have the output directory under version control. That way, in case you do something silly, you can easily revert changes.