You need Java installed (Java 8 or later), and to build, you need to have Maven installed as well.

You need to have an RDBMS for storing stream, task and app states in the database. The local Data Flow server by default uses embedded H2 database for this.

You also need to have Redis running if you are running any streams that involve analytics applications. Redis may also be required run the unit/integration tests.

For the deployed streams and tasks to communicate, either RabbitMQ or Kafka needs to be installed. The local server registers sources, sink, processors and tasks the are published from the Spring Cloud Stream App Starters and Spring Cloud Task App Starters repository. By default the server registers these applications that use Kafka, but setting the property binding to rabbit will register a list of applications that use RabbitMQ as the message broker.