FAILED TO WRITE PID installing Zookeeper

Question

I am new to Zookeeper and it has being a real issue to install it and run. I am not sure what is wrong in here but I will explain what I\'ve being doing to make it more clear:

Answer 1

It seems you do not have the required permissions. The /var/log owner is is going to be root. Zookeeper stores the process id and snapshot of data in that directory. The process id of the spawned zookeeper server is stored in a file -zookeeper_server.pid (as of 3.3.6)

If you have root previleges, you could start zookeeper with sudo (root) previleges, it should work but definitely not recommended. Make sure you start zookeeper with the same(or higher) permissions as the owner of the directory.

Create a new directory in your home folder like /home/username/zookeeper-data. Let dataDir point to that directory and it should work.

Answer 2

Seems there's all kinds of reasons this can happen. So many helpful answers here!

For me, I had improper line endings in my zoo.cfg file, and possibly invisible characters, so zookeeper was trying to create directories like /var/zookeeper? and /var/zookeeper\r. Reworking my zoo.cfg a bit fixed it for me, along with deleting zoo_sample.conf.

Answer 3

Go to /usr/local/etc/
You will find zookeeper directory
delete the directory
and restart the server - zkServer start

Answer 4

Change the path give dataDir=/tmp/zookeeper. If it works then its clearly access issues

But its generally not advisable to use tmp directory.

Answer 5

This seems to be an ownership issue; running the following solved this for me.

$ sudo chown -R $USER /var/lib/zookeeper

N.B. I've outlined my steps below which show the error I was getting (the same as the error in this SO question) and the attempt at trying the solution proposed by a user above, which advised to provide zoo.cfg as an argument.

13:01:29 ✔ ~  :: $ZK/bin/zkServer.sh start
ZooKeeper JMX enabled by default
Using config: /usr/local/Cellar/zookeeper/3.4.14/libexec/bin/../conf/zoo.cfg
Starting zookeeper ... /usr/local/Cellar/zookeeper/3.4.14/libexec/bin/zkServer.sh: line 149: /var/lib/zookeeper/zookeeper_server.pid: Permission denied
FAILED TO WRITE PID

13:01:32 ✘ ~  :: $ZK/bin/zkServer.sh start $ZK/conf/zoo.cfg
ZooKeeper JMX enabled by default
Using config: /usr/local/Cellar/zookeeper/3.4.14/libexec/conf/zoo.cfg
Starting zookeeper ... /usr/local/Cellar/zookeeper/3.4.14/libexec/bin/zkServer.sh: line 149: /var/lib/zookeeper/zookeeper_server.pid: Permission denied
FAILED TO WRITE PID

13:04:45 ✔ /var/lib  :: ls -la
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  4 root     wheel 128 Apr 19 18:55 .
drwxr-xr-x 27 root     wheel 864 Apr 19 18:55 ..
drwxr--r--  3 root     wheel  96 Mar 24 15:07 zookeeper
13:04:48 ✔ /var/lib  :: echo $USER
tallamjr
13:06:03 ✔ /var/lib  :: sudo chown -R $USER zookeeper
Password:
13:06:44 ✔ /var/lib  :: ls -la
total 0
drwxr-xr-x  4 root     wheel 128 Apr 19 18:55 .
drwxr-xr-x 27 root     wheel 864 Apr 19 18:55 ..
drwxr--r--  3 tallamjr wheel  96 Mar 24 15:07 zookeeper

13:06:48 ✔ ~  :: $ZK/bin/zkServer.sh start
ZooKeeper JMX enabled by default
Using config: /usr/local/Cellar/zookeeper/3.4.14/libexec/bin/../conf/zoo.cfg
Starting zookeeper ... STARTED

REF: - https://askubuntu.com/questions/6723/change-folder-permissions-and-ownership