Tutorial — your first replication

By the end you’ll have file-replicator watching a directory, and you’ll drop a file into it and watch it be copied to a destination directory, verified, and the source archived — plus see the granular event stream and query live status on demand. No cloud account required: this uses the built-in local destination.

1. Prerequisites

• A Rust toolchain (stable) — build from the repo root with cargo.
• A local MQTT broker on localhost:1883 for the event/command plane (docker run -d -p 1883:1883 emqx/emqx). Replication itself is filesystem work and would run without a broker, but the broker is what lets you watch events/metrics and call get-status in steps 5–7.

The default build features are standalone + dest-s3; the local destination is always compiled in, so a plain cargo run is all you need for this walkthrough (no destination feature flags).

2. Create the spool directories

The bundled test-configs/config.json defines one instance, spool-to-archive, with relative paths under ./_spool. Create them from the repo root:

mkdir -p _spool/in _spool/out _spool/archive

That instance watches _spool/in recursively, replicates each ready file to the local destination _spool/out (with fsync), verifies by checksum, and on success archives the source into _spool/archive.

3. Run the component

# HOST platform, MQTT transport (local broker), FILE config source, ThingName "my-thing":
cargo run -- \
  --platform HOST --transport MQTT ./test-configs/standalone-messaging.json \
  -c FILE ./test-configs/config.json \
  -t my-thing

You should see it parse the instance (spool-to-archive), log OS file watch active for _spool/in (the low-latency discovery path), and settle into watching. It is now idle only because _spool/in is empty.

4. Drop a file and watch it replicate

In another shell, from the repo root, write a file into the watched directory:

echo "hello file-replicator" > _spool/in/report.txt

Within a second or two (the default stability readiness strategy waits quietSecs: 5 of no size/mtime change to be sure the file is fully written), the file is judged ready, replicated, and verified. Confirm:

ls _spool/out          # report.txt now here (the replicated copy)
ls _spool/in           # empty — the source was moved out on success
ls _spool/archive      # report.txt here (the archived source)

That is the whole engine end to end: discover → ready → replicate → verify → complete (here, onSuccess: archive). Try a subtree — mkdir _spool/in/sub && echo x > _spool/in/sub/a.txt — and note the sub/ path is preserved under _spool/out because ingress.recursive is true.

5. Watch the event stream

Every lifecycle step is published on the UNS evt class. One wildcard covers every instance of every device:

mosquitto_sub -t 'ecv1/+/FileReplicator/+/evt/#' -v

The broker payload is an EdgeCommons protobuf envelope, so a plain MQTT client shows bytes rather than JSON. A protobuf-aware EdgeCommons client or test harness will show decoded events with this topic/body shape:

ecv1/my-thing/FileReplicator/spool-to-archive/evt/info/file-ready              {"severity":"info","type":"file-ready","context":{"path":"report2.txt","size":22}, ...}
ecv1/my-thing/FileReplicator/spool-to-archive/evt/info/replication-started     { ... "context":{"path":"report2.txt","destination":"local","attempt":1, ...} }
ecv1/my-thing/FileReplicator/spool-to-archive/evt/info/replication-completed   { ... "context":{"path":"report2.txt","destination":"local","bytes":22, ...} }
ecv1/my-thing/FileReplicator/spool-to-archive/evt/info/file-archived           { ... "context":{"path":"report2.txt","archivePath":"..."} }

The channel (evt/{severity}/{type}) is derived from the event body, so the topic and body can never disagree. The full catalog — every type, its severity, and its context fields — is in the messaging interface reference and data-types reference.

6. Watch replication metrics

The component emits metrics through the library-owned UNS metric class when metricEmission.target routes them to messaging:

mosquitto_sub -t 'ecv1/+/FileReplicator/+/metric/#' -v

The tutorial config emits the compatibility fileReplicator group plus richer operational groups such as FileReplicatorTransfer, FileReplicatorQueue, and FileReplicatorDiscovery. The compatibility filesReplicated, bytesReplicated, and filesFailed measures are durable cumulative totals; the *Interval measures are per-completion deltas for CloudWatch Sum views. Rich groups use bounded dimensions like instance, destinationType, result, and readinessStrategy rather than paths, filenames, bucket names, or raw errors.

7. Ask for status on demand

There is no retained state snapshot; the current picture is a request/reply command. Send a protobuf EdgeCommons command envelope to the component-scope command inbox with header.name = "get-status" and a reply_to topic. In Rust, that is the normal MessageBuilder + MessagingService::request path:

let topic = gg.uns().topic_with_channel(UnsClass::Cmd, "get-status")?;
let req = MessageBuilder::new("get-status", "1.0")
    .payload(serde_json::json!({}))
    .build();
let messaging = gg.messaging().expect("messaging transport");
let reply = messaging.request(&topic, req).await?.await?;

Do not send the JSON object above as raw MQTT text; raw JSON is not the EdgeCommons message wire format. After decoding, the reply body is {"ok":true,"result": …} where result is the component roster + summary. Use a request body of {"instance":"spool-to-archive"} to get that one instance’s document (awaiting/inProgress/replicated/failed tallies). Both shapes are specified in the data-types reference.

8. Where to next

• Change the destination to S3, SFTP, HTTP, Azure, or GCS — How-to guides and Sample configurations.
• Gate replication to a nightly window, cap bandwidth, or quarantine failures — How-to guides.
• Understand why discovery, readiness, durability, and scheduling behave as they do — Explanation.
• Look up every field — Reference › Configuration.