Installing Blackfire

Installing Blackfire

Installing and updating Blackfire should be a quick process. This document will guide you through the steps.

For a better experience, you should or .

Tell us what you want to do:

I want to Blackfire
on
which uses
for the language.

To start using Blackfire, we are going to install the following:

  • A language extension;
  • An agent to communicate with Blackfire's servers;
  • A profiling client (a browser extension or a CLI tool).

Blackfire uses a custom Debian repository to distribute its packages; it is compatible with most Debian-based distributions like Ubuntu and Linux-Mint.

  1. Register the packagecloud key:
    wget -q -O - https://packages.blackfire.io/gpg.key | sudo apt-key add -
  2. Add the repository to Debian source list:
    echo "deb http://packages.blackfire.io/debian any main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/blackfire.list
  3. Update the repositories:
    sudo apt update
  1. Install the blackfire-agent package:
    sudo apt install blackfire-agent

  1. This command asks for some Blackfire server credentials, log in or sign up now to get them:

    or

    Learn more about the agent configuration file.
  2. Restart the agent service: 
    sudo /etc/init.d/blackfire-agent restart

    During the agent installation, a new /etc/init.d/blackfire-agent service was created to start, stop, and restart it. Whenever you modify the agent configuration, restart it.

  3. If something goes wrong, check out the log file generated by default in /var/log/blackfire/agent.log. Change the log file or the log level in the agent configuration file.

Install the Go Probe

  1. Import the Blackfire module in your code base:
    import github.com/blackfireio/go-blackfire
  2. Update your code to enable profiling in your Go applications.

Check that there are no errors in the logs. To debug problems, change the log level and the log file in the probe configuration.

To profile applications, use the Go SDK.

For on-demand profiling, you need to install a profiling client:

  • Profile from the command line via the blackfire tool (Web applications, APIs, command line tools, daemons, and more).

    Configure it with your personal credentials:

    blackfire config --client-id=CLIENT_ID --client-token=CLIENT_TOKEN

Start profiling via: