In some cases, you might want to construct Metadata events directly and use programmatic ways to emit that metadata to DataHub. Use-cases are typically push-based and include emitting metadata events from CI/CD pipelines, custom orchestrators etc.
The [`io.acryl:datahub-client`](https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/io.acryl/datahub-client) Java package offers REST emitter API-s, which can be easily used to emit metadata from your JVM-based systems. For example, the Spark lineage integration uses the Java emitter to emit metadata events from Spark jobs.
**_Note_**: Check the [Maven repository](https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/io.acryl/datahub-client) for the latest version of the package before following the instructions below.
The REST emitter is a thin wrapper on top of the [`Apache HttpClient`](https://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-4.5.x/index.html) library. It supports non-blocking emission of metadata and handles the details of JSON serialization of metadata aspects over the wire.
Constructing a REST Emitter follows a lambda-based fluent builder pattern. The config parameters mirror the Python emitter [configuration](../../metadata-ingestion/sink_docs/datahub.md#config-details) for the most part. In addition, you can also customize the HttpClient that is constructed under the hood by passing in customizations to the HttpClient builder.
The Kafka emitter is a thin wrapper on top of the SerializingProducer class from `confluent-kafka` and offers a non-blocking interface for sending metadata events to DataHub. Use this when you want to decouple your metadata producer from the uptime of your datahub metadata server by utilizing Kafka as a highly available message bus. For example, if your DataHub metadata service is down due to planned or unplanned outages, you can still continue to collect metadata from your mission critical systems by sending it to Kafka. Also use this emitter when throughput of metadata emission is more important than acknowledgement of metadata being persisted to DataHub's backend store.
**_Note_**: The Kafka emitter uses Avro to serialize the Metadata events to Kafka. Changing the serializer will result in unprocessable events as DataHub currently expects the metadata events over Kafka to be serialized in Avro.
If you're interested in looking at the Kafka emitter code, it is available [here](./datahub-client/src/main/java/datahub/client/kafka/KafkaEmitter.java).
The File emitter writes metadata change proposal events (MCPs) into a JSON file that can be later handed off to the Python [Metadata File source](docs/generated/ingestion/sources/metadata-file.md) for ingestion. This works analogous to the [Metadata File sink](../../metadata-ingestion/sink_docs/metadata-file.md) in Python. This mechanism can be used when the system producing metadata events doesn't have direct connection to DataHub's REST server or Kafka brokers. The generated JSON file can be transferred later and then ingested into DataHub using the [Metadata File source](docs/generated/ingestion/sources/metadata-file.md).
The File emitter only supports writing to the local filesystem currently. If you're interested in adding support for S3, GCS etc., contributions are welcome!