Installing and Running ZooKeeper

When trying out ZooKeeper for the first time, it’s simplest to run it in standalone mode with a single ZooKeeper server. You can do this on a development machine, for example. ZooKeeper requires Java 6 to run, so make sure you have it installed first. You don’t need Cygwin to run ZooKeeper on Windows, since there are Windows versions of the ZooKeeper scripts. (Windows is supported only as a development platform, not as a production platform.)

Download a stable release of ZooKeeper from the Apache ZooKeeper releases page at http://hadoop.apache.org/zookeeper/releases.html, and unpack the tarball in a suitable location:

% tar xzf zookeeper-x.y.z.tar.gz

ZooKeeper provides a few binaries to run and interact with the service, and it’s convenient to put the directory containing the binaries on your command-line path: