Understanding the Kettle home directory
When you run Spoon for the first time, a folder named .kettle is created in your home directory by default. This folder is referred to as the Kettle home directory.
The folder contains several configuration files, mainly created and updated by the different PDI tools. Among these files, there is the kettle.properties file.
The purpose of the kettle.properties file – created along with the .kettle folder, the first time you run Spoon – is to contain variable definitions with a broad scope: Java Virtual Machine. Therefore, it's the perfect place to define general settings; some examples are as follows:
- Database connection settings: host, database name, and so on
- SMTP settings: SMTP server, port, and so on
- Common input and output folders
- Directory to send log files to
Before continuing, let's add some variables to the file. Suppose that you have two folders, named C:/PDI/INPUT and C:/PDI/OUTPUT, which you will use for storing files. The objective will be to...
