Building Cassandra Thrift Bindings on OS X

A few weeks ago, I came to Rackspace to work full-time on Cassandra in their cloud division.  So far, I'm having fun and learning new things.  Apart from Cassandra, one of the projects I get to figure out is Thrift.  Thrift is a tool that allows you to define a service interface and then generate stubbed service bindings in different programming languages.  A programmer then takes the generated code and makes it do the things it is supposed to.  In an ideal world, this simplifies the process of, say, stubbing in a PHP client that can speak to a server stubbed in Java.

Right now, I'm the lone wolf in the office doing development on OS X.  The glitches so far have been minor, but I was forewarned that I might want to reconsider [using linux] when it came time to work with Thrift.  Well, that time started today.  I've been a faithful linux user for about 10 years, but I've been a faithful Mac user even longer.  I'm not ready to make the switch to full-time linux yet; I like my Mac.

Fortunately, Google was my friend when it came to figuring out the secrets of building Thrift on OS X.  Credit goes to Nathan Ostgard and his blog post for getting me going in the right direction.

1.  You definitely want to install macports.
2.  Install boost and log4j
sudo port install boost
sudo port install jakarta-log4j

3.  Download and install thrift
curl -o thrift.tgz "http://gitweb.thrift-rpc.org/?p=thrift.git;a=snapshot;h=HEAD;sf=tgz"
tar -xvf thrift.tgz
cd thrift
echo "thrift.extra.cpath = /opt/local/share/java/jakarta-log4j.jar" > ~/.thrift-build.properties
./bootstrap.sh
./configure --prefix=/opt/local

4.  You're going to get an error during configure:
./configure: line 16440: syntax error near unexpected token `MONO,'
./configure: line 16440: `  PKG_CHECK_MODULES(MONO, mono >= 2.0.0, net_3_5=yes, net_3_5=no)'

I couldn't figure out how to tell configure "no csharp, please" through the command line, so I just commented out lines 16439-16442 and ran configure again:

./configure --prefix=/opt/local

5.  You know the drill:
make
sudo make install

That's it for Thrift.  The next step is to generate the Cassandra client.  The Cassandra wiki has steps to generate a python client.  This works fine except that the thrift python module was installed to a place where the OS X python can't see it. You'll get the following error if you try to run Cassandra-remote:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./Cassandra-remote", line 11, in
    from thrift.transport import TTransport
ImportError: No module named thrift.transport

There is probably a right way to fix this problem, a way that is right for OS X, but I had no patience.  I added the the following line to my ~/.profile:

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.6/site-packages

Restart terminal, navigate back to the directory where the python client was generated and try again.  Cassandra-remote should spew out a verbose usage directive.

That's it; you're done.

If you found this useful, or have feedback, please let me know.  I use gmail (gdusbabek).  I also emit the occasional tweet; just follow gdusbabek. 

If you're interested in learning more about Cassandra, there is an active and helpful IRC channel (#cassandra) on freenode and mailing lists as well.  The wiki also contains useful information for beginners.