Installing Apache Thrift in Ubuntu

Apache Thrift is a RPC framework for scalable cross-language services development which in simpler words allows easy exchange of data such as variables, objects between applications written in different languages. Thrift offers seamless cross language serialization between languages like C++, Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, Perl, Haskell, C#, Cocoa, Smalltalk and OCaml, through Code generation. The advantage of Thrift is that it’s faster than using SOAP since it’s using a binary protocol.

For better understanding of Thrift's architecture which consists of Transports, Protocols and Processors I recommend you to go through the paper I found [1].
Thrift was initially developed at Facebook, and now open sourced as an Apache project. Since I found Thrift is less documented, in this post I'll try to walk through the installation steps in Ubuntu.

I have tested this on Ubuntu 11.11 and 12.04

To install Thrift

Step 1.
First install
sudo apt-get install libboost-dev libboost-test-dev libboost-program-options-dev libevent-dev automake libtool flex bison pkg-config g++ libssl-dev

Step 2.
Then Download tar.gz archive from the download site, decompress archive in your home directory:
tar -xvzf thrift-0.8.0.tar.gz

Step 3.
Go to the installation root directory  and run
$ ./configure

Step 4.
A the end of the output you will find something like this

thrift 0.8.0
Building code generators ..... :
Building C++ Library ......... : yes
Building C (GLib) Library .... : no
Building Java Library ........ : yes
Building C# Library .......... : no
Building Python Library ...... : yes
Building Ruby Library ........ : no
Building Haskell Library ..... : no
Building Perl Library ........ : no
Building PHP Library ......... : no
Building Erlang Library ...... : no
Building Go Library .......... : no
Building TZlibTransport ...... : yes
Building TNonblockingServer .. : yes
Using javac .................. : javac
Using java ................... : java
Using ant .................... : /usr/bin/ant
Using Python ................. : /usr/bin/python

Check whether the libraries for your development environment have been code generated. If something is missing skim through the output of configure to find the missing component and install that, and then again run step 3.

Step 5.
Finally from the same directory run
$ make

Step 6.
Now run
$ sudo make install

Now your done

To check whether Thrift is working, run;
$ thrift -version

[1] http://thrift.apache.org/static/thrift-20070401.pdf