The Logstash Lines: Logstash 1.5.0 RC3 released

Welcome back to The Logstash Lines! In these weekly posts, we'll share the latest happenings in the world of Logstash and its ecosystem.

Logstash 1.5.0 RC3 is out!

More #Logstash news today! Happy to announce 1.5.0 RC3 is now available w/performance improvements, bug fixes & more https://t.co/EFFu6nCiKb
— elastic (@elastic) April 23, 2015

Logstash Core

Recent fixes for 1.5 RC3 include:

• JVM Options: We added the ability to append extra JVM options while running LS by setting the LS_JAVA_OPTS environment variable. We also added the ability to completely replace the JVM options. For example, users can change the GC algorithm if they wish and use their own options instead of our defaults.
• Workarounds for Java 8 and JRuby issues:
  • We stumbled on a JRuby collections issue while debugging an  issue in multiline. JRuby provides its own implementations for collection methods like Map#replace, and Map#merge which now conflicts with Java 8's native support. Until the issue is resolved upstream, we implemented a workaround.
  • Added our workaround implementation for Map#has_key? to fix a bug which was returning false for a key which had nil value. This affected mutate filter behavior when fields had a nil value.

• Plugins: We started accepting community developed plugins for 1.5.0 into the  logstash-plugins GitHub organization. This week alone we initiated new repos for New Relic output, Slack output and Neo4J input and output. Watch these repos if you are interested in following their development.
• Documentation: Logstash documentation is now directly editable from http://elastic.co/guide/en/logstash. Just click on the icon and you'll be sent to the appropriate GitHub repository for editing!

To round out this week's update, here's an excellent blog post on how to develop Logstash configuration files.

That's this week in The Logstash Lines. Come back next week for more Logstash news!