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Deploying a Federator Locally

Repository: federator
Description: deploying the federator locally.

A Guide showing the steps on deploying a federator locally.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The following guide shows how to deploy a federator locally that can be connected to two IA Nodes.

This guide will assume you have already followed the setup in Running the federator locally and have already set up your maven .m2/settings.xml profile and have a working PAT (Personal Access Token).

Federator Deployment

  1. Locate the docker/docker-compose-grpc.yml file which contains a federator client and server.

  2. Replace the image of the federator-server and federator-client with their respective GHCR images, we recommend checking the released federator packages for an up-to-date version.

 federator-server:
 #    image: uk.gov.dbt.ndtp/${ARTIFACT_ID}-server:${VERSION}
     image: ghcr.io/national-digital-twin/federator/federator-server:0.90.0

... Rest of file ...

federator-client:
#  image: uk.gov.dbt.ndtp/${ARTIFACT_ID}-client:${VERSION}
   image: ghcr.io/national-digital-twin/federator/federator-client:0.90.0
3. Start the docker containers with the following command:

docker compose --file docker/docker-compose-grpc.yml up -d
4. Wait for the services to start and data to be loaded into the federated Kafka topic. 5. Check federated messages have been filtered in Kafka with the following Kafka consumer command:

./kafka-console-consumer.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:29093 --topic federated-client1-FederatorServer1-knowledge --from-beginning

Changing Topics (Optional)

This sections shows how to add another topic to the federator 'stack' to choose where data is sent and then federated.

  1. Locate the docker/docker-grpc-resources/docker-compose-shared.yml file which contains the source and target kafka topics, and some helpful shell scripts to add and remove data.

  2. On line 135, add RDF to the end:

environment:
  BOOTSTRAP_VALUE: "kafka-src:19092"
  KAFKA_TOPICS: "knowledge knowledge1 knowledge2 RDF"

Additional Test Data (Optional)

This sections shows how to add additional test data to a new topic that can be monitored by the federator.

  1. Like changing topics Locate the docker/docker-grpc-resources/docker-compose-shared.yml file

  2. Update line 152 by adding the RDF Topic and ${KNOWLEDGE_DATA_3}:

environment:
 KAFKA_BROKER_SERVER : "kafka-src:19092"
 KNOWLEDGE_TOPIC: "knowledge knowledge1 knowledge2 RDF"
 KNOWLEDGE_DATA: "${KNOWLEDGE_DATA} ${KNOWLEDGE_DATA_1} ${KNOWLEDGE_DATA_2} ${KNOWLEDGE_DATA_3}"
3. Update .env file located in /docker/.env with the following sample data:

KNOWLEDGE_DATA_3=simple-sample-test3.dat
4. Create a new simple-sample-test3.dat file containing triples data and an optional Security-Label header in docker/input (or copy simple-sample-test2.dat and rename the file). 5. Start your containers with the following docker compose command:

docker compose --file docker/docker-compose-grpc.yml up -d
6. Check the federated messages on your new topic:

./kafka-console-consumer.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:29093 --topic federated-client1-FederatorServer1-RDF --from-beginning

or your un-federated messages on the source kafka topic:

./kafka-console-consumer.sh --bootstrap-server localhost:19093 --topic RDF --from-beginning

Maintained by the National Digital Twin Programme (NDTP).

© Crown Copyright 2025. This work has been developed by the National Digital Twin Programme and is legally attributed to the Department for Business and Trade (UK) as the governing entity.
Licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
For full licensing terms, see OGL_LICENSE.md.