Quick Start Guide to Using Metl

Are you looking for a simple, web-based integration platform that allows for several different styles of data integration including messaging, file based Extract/Transform/Load (ETL), and remote procedure invocation via Web Services that is easy to use and quick to setup?

In this blog I’m going to walk through the steps to install and run your first flow in Metl in a Windows environment.

Installation

For this example, we will use the simplest way to run Metl which is to run it stand-alone using the internal Jetty container.

1. Download the metl.war file, make sure a Java 8 run-time environment is installed and in the path.

2. In order to run Metl, simply run the following from a command prompt:

java -jar metl.war

3. Once Metl is started, open a web browser and navigate to:

http://localhost:42000/metl/app

Now you can begin to build and execute Metl flows.

Run a Flow

There are several sample flows already created and ready to run. Here I’m going to run the Flat File to Relational Database flow.

1. Navigate to the Design tab and expand the project Samples followed by the Flows folder.

2. Double click the name of the flow ‘Flat File to Relational Database’.

Your screen should look similar to the image below.

This screen shows the flow components and the order of process. The lower window displays properties of a selected component. Some components have additional options that are found by double clicking the component.

3. Click the ‘Run’ button and your screen will look like the following:

This screen shows run-time details and various logging outputs. As the flow executes you will see the status change on each step. Clicking on a Component Name row in the upper right window will display the log results (if applicable) in the lower window.

That’s it, you have installed and run your first Metl flow.

For additional documentation on Metl see:

https://github.com/JumpMind/metl/wiki