Lab 2 - Thrift Installation

For this lab, we will use Apache Thrift, which is a cross-platfrom, cross-language RPC library. For the homework task, you will use 2 different programming language to implement a client-server application. One of them will be C++ and you can choose the other one. The chosen language must support Binary and Multiplex protocols (see table https://thrift.apache.org/docs/Languages.html)

To use Thrift, we will need:

• A Thrift IDL compiler, to generate source code from IDL files
• Files needed to compile our code (header files, jars, ...)
• Files needed to run the code (shared libaries, jars, ...)

You may choose to install Thrift by:

• Installing packages from repositories, specific to your distribution and the selected language
• Building from source - allows selecting which languages are supported before building

Installing from repositories

Packages for the compiler and the C++ library may be available in your system repository. Packages for Java, Node.js, Python, and possible for other languages, are available in their respective package managers.

• Thrift compiler - in Ubuntu: sudo apt install thrift-compiler
• C++ library - in Ubuntu: sudo apt install libthrift-dev
• Java - in Maven, add dependency to libthrift from org.apache.thrift
• Node.js - in NPM: npm install -g thrift
• Python - in PyPI: pip install thrift

Builing from source

If building from source, you can choose which languages will be supported. Disable languages that you will not use to speed up the build and avoid build errors. Support for some languages may require installing additional packages on the system.

Preparation

Download the source code from https://www.apache.org/dyn/closer.cgi?path=/thrift/0.18.1/thrift-0.18.1.tar.gz .

Unzip the source code:

tar -xf thrift-0.18.1.tar.gz
cd thrift-0.18.1

Run a bootstrap script:

./bootstrap.sh

You may need to install additional packages on your system before building thrift, such as libtool, flex, bison, automake, libboost-all-dev, libssl-dev, libcrypto++-dev, python3-dev.

Build

Configure the build, including selection of supported languages.

See the help for available options.

./configure --help

• Use --with-XXX flags to select supported languages.
• Use --without-XXX flags to disable languages (to avoid errors and speed up the build).

Finally, build and install the library.

make
sudo make install

Computers in Rotunda

On the computers in rotunda, thrift packages are not installed, so I recommend building from source for the compiler and for C++ support. Use a --prefix option of configure to specify your directory where thrift will be installed, then run make install without sudo. This configuration has been tested (all languages except C++ are disabled).

 ./configure --disable-tests --without-qt5 --without-c_glib --without-java --without-erlang --without-nodejs --without-nodets \
   --without-lua --without-python --without-py3 --without-perl --without-php --without-php_extension --without-dart \
   --without-ruby --without-haskell --without-go --without-swift --without-rs --without-cl --without-haxe --without-netstd \
   --without-d --prefix=$HOME/thrift

Then, build and install the library:

make
make install

For Java, Node.js or Python, use the respective pacakge managers.

It is possible to enable more languages, but for some of them, make or make install may fail.