What is RudderStack?

RudderStack is a customer data pipeline tool for collecting, routing and processing data from your websites, apps, cloud tools, and data warehouse.

More information on RudderStack can be found here.

RudderStack Control Plane Lite

RudderStack has two components: control plane and data plane.

The data plane reliably delivers your event data, while the control plane manages the configuration of your sources and destinations.

To learn more about the data plane and control plane, refer to the RudderStack Architecture.

RudderStack's Control Plane Lite utility provides the UI to self-host and manage these source and destination configurations. All the source and destination configuration stays on your local storage. You can also export or import these configurations to a JSON file.

To read more about the Control Plane Lite utility, refer to the RudderStack documentation.

Setup

Requirement: Use Node.js v14 for the best experience. (Node v16 and higher versions are not supported)

To set up the RudderStack Control Plane Lite, run the following commands:

1. npm install
2. npm start

The Control Plane Lite starts on the default port i.e., http://localhost:3000.

On a successful setup, you should see the following:

Exporting workspace configuration

After adding the required sources and destinations, export your workspace config. This workspace config is required by the RudderStack server.

To learn more about adding sources and destinations in RudderStack, refer to the RudderStack documentation.

Update the config variables configFromFile and configJSONPath in your RudderStack server to read the workspace configuration from the exported JSON file.

Starting RudderStack with the workspace config file

1. Download the workspace config file on your machine.
2. In docker-compose.yml, uncomment volumes section under backend service. Specify the path to your workspace config.
3. In build/docker.env, set the environment variable RSERVER_BACKEND_CONFIG_CONFIG_FROM_FILE=true
4. Start RudderStack by running the command docker-compose up

For more information, refer to the RudderStack documentation.

Exporting source configuration

After adding the required sources and destinations, export your source config for the sources. This source config is required by the RudderStack SDKs. After downloading the source config file, you need to host that file on the /sourceConfig end-point. Then, specify that link as your controlPlaneUrl while initializing the SDK.

More information

For more information and documentation related to the RudderStack Control Plane Lite, refer to the RudderStack documentation.

Some more points to note:

• You can make use of the addDestinationSource.js file in the src/scripts to automatically generate the required config code automatically.
• Make use of the print functions to generate the code in the required format.
• You can alter the printConfig function to generate the config for your sources or destinations.

Contact us

If you come across any issues while configuring or using the RudderStack Control Plane Lite, feel free to start a conversation on our Slack channel.