avro-cli-examples

Examples on how to use the command line tools in Avro Tools to read and write Avro files.

See my original article Reading and Writing Avro Files From the Command Line from April 2013 for more information about using Avro Tools.

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Table of Contents

• Getting Avro Tools
• JSON to binary Avro
• Binary Avro to JSON
• Retrieve Avro schema from binary Avro
• Related tools

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Getting Avro Tools

You can get a copy of the latest stable Avro Tools jar file from the Avro Releases page. The actual file is in the java subdirectory of a given Avro release version.

Here is a direct link to avro-tools-1.7.7.jar (12 MB) on the US Apache mirror site.

File overview

• twitter.avro -- data records in uncompressed binary Avro format
• twitter.snappy.avro -- data records in Snappy-compressed binary Avro format
• twitter.avsc -- Avro schema of the example data
• twitter.json -- data records in plain-text JSON format
• twitter.pretty.json -- data records in pretty-printed JSON format

JSON to binary Avro

Without compression:

$ java -jar ~/avro-tools-1.7.7.jar fromjson --schema-file twitter.avsc twitter.json > twitter.avro

With Snappy compression:

$ java -jar ~/avro-tools-1.7.7.jar fromjson --codec snappy --schema-file twitter.avsc twitter.json

Binary Avro to JSON

The same command will work on both uncompressed and compressed data.

$ java -jar ~/avro-tools-1.7.7.jar tojson twitter.avro > twitter.json
$ java -jar ~/avro-tools-1.7.7.jar tojson twitter.snappy.avro > twitter.json

Output:

{"username":"miguno","tweet":"Rock: Nerf paper, scissors is fine.","timestamp": 1366150681 }
{"username":"BlizzardCS","tweet":"Works as intended.  Terran is IMBA.","timestamp": 1366154481 }

You can also pretty-print the JSON output with the -pretty parameter:

$ java -jar ~/avro-tools-1.7.7.jar tojson -pretty twitter.avro > twitter.pretty.json
$ java -jar ~/avro-tools-1.7.7.jar tojson -pretty twitter.snappy.avro > twitter.pretty.json

Output:

{
  "username" : "miguno",
  "tweet" : "Rock: Nerf paper, scissors is fine.",
  "timestamp" : 1366150681
}
{
  "username" : "BlizzardCS",
  "tweet" : "Works as intended.  Terran is IMBA.",
  "timestamp" : 1366154481
}

Retrieve Avro schema from binary Avro

The same command will work on both uncompressed and compressed data.

$ java -jar ~/avro-tools-1.7.7.jar getschema twitter.avro > twitter.avsc
$ java -jar ~/avro-tools-1.7.7.jar getschema twitter.snappy.avro > twitter.avsc

Related tools

You can also take a look at the CLI tools avrocat, avromod, and avropipe that are part of the Avro suite. You must build these tools yourself by following their respective INSTALL instructions.