Stand alone installation?

[vfilter]

Are there any plans to offer a standalone installation without all the added Redpanda baggage? Installing things with brew have increased package size from 22mb to 120mb with added complexity on the command line without any tangible benefit. We really liked Benthos and are sad about the sudden transition with degradation in documentation quality and ease of use. Would be great to know whether to go all in on Bento or stick with this.🤞

[mihaitodor]

Hey @vfilter 👋 The standalone GitHub releases which contain prebuilt artifacts for all supported platforms will always be available here. This is just the redpanda-connect (formerly benthos) static binary produced by go build which doesn't include the rpk tool. You can download the archive, decompress it and set it up as you wish.

Alternatively, if you have Go installed, you can go install it like so:

> git clone https://github.com/redpanda-data/connect.git
> cd connect
> git checkout tags/v4.30.1 # or whichever is the latest tag
> go install ./cmd/redpanda-connect

Unfortunately, it's not currently possible to run go install github.com/redpanda-data/connect/v4/cmd/redpanda-connect@latest due to some limitations of Go modules: golang/go#44840.

We used to have support for https://asdf-vm.com as well (see here), but someone needs to look into updating that. I don't have the bandwidth right now, but PRs are welcome.

Note: We try to prevent the prebuilt all-in-one binary from blowing up in size, but many connectors rely on 3rd party libraries which we don't have any control over. The only option is to not include them by default if they cross certain limits. In practice, users should consider crafting their own binary and importing selectively whichever components they need as described here: https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda-connect-plugin-example.

degradation in documentation quality and ease of use.

Would you mind providing some extra details on this? There is ongoing effort to improve things, but we need actionable feedback to share with the documentation team.

[Jeffail]

There's also going to be standalone docker images pushed to https://hub.docker.com/r/redpandadata/connect, this will start at the next tagged released.

[tbnguyen1407]

Hello, for the new artifact suffix "-community" and "-cloud", how will it affect the docker image tags? I don't see extra tags for those on dockerhub. Thanks