Sounds like a useful feature. Consider using syntax compatible with the existing stuff, but not to be confused with the header syntax.

Perhaps %(localhost) or something like that.

By the way, getting the hostname from the local machine isn't as easy as you might expect in Java. See the comments on this SO thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/7348711/recommended-way-to-get-hostname-in-java

Possibly the most reliable way is to shell out and execute hostname – this sounds like it should be portable since you should end up with /bin/hostname on *Nix and HOSTNAME.EXE on Windows. See http://stackoverflow.com/a/28043703

This may be worth writing a utility function for that caches the result, possibly invalidating that cache when the sink is reconfigured or something like that.

Thanks @mpercy I took a look at this and tested on a few different hosts and the InetAddress.getLocalHost() approach seemed to work ok. This is also how we do it now for the existing host intereceptor so I think we are ok, per the comments in the RB.

Hey Jeff, thanks for testing. If it seems to work fine then I'm ok with it

+1. I am about to commit this.

Commit a0a50849d5ad33e6e6903316a3bd3dbba8547843 in flume's branch refs/heads/trunk from Jeff Holoman
[ https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf?p=flume.git;h=a0a5084 ]

FLUME-2982. Add localhost escape sequence to HDFS sink

It would be useful to be able to just use %[localhost] escape sequence
instead of having to pass in a header or use the host interceptor.

Part of the problem of using an interceptor is the case where Flume only
consists of a channel and a sink (think KafkaChannel). There is support
in Flume for a sink-side interceptor at the time of this writing.

Reviewers: Grant Henke, Mike Percy

(Jeff Holoman via Mike Percy)

Pushed to trunk. Thanks for the patch Jeff!

FAILURE: Integrated in Jenkins build Flume-trunk-hbase-1 #203 (See https://builds.apache.org/job/Flume-trunk-hbase-1/203/)
FLUME-2982. Add localhost escape sequence to HDFS sink (mpercy: http://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/flume/repo?p=flume.git&a=commit&h=a0a50849d5ad33e6e6903316a3bd3dbba8547843)

• (edit) flume-ng-core/src/main/java/org/apache/flume/formatter/output/BucketPath.java
• (edit) flume-ng-doc/sphinx/FlumeUserGuide.rst
• (edit) flume-ng-core/src/test/java/org/apache/flume/formatter/output/TestBucketPath.java