elixir-thrift/README.md

Thrift Utilities for Elixir

This package contains a handful of useful utilities for working with Thrift in Elixir.

In particular, it includes a copy of the Erlang Thrift runtime library.

Setup

Start by adding this package to your project as a dependency:

{:thrift, github: "pinterest/elixir-thrift", submodules: true}

Mix

This package includes a Mix compiler task that can be used to automate Thrift code generation. Start by adding :thrift to your project's :compilers list. For example:

compilers: [:thrift | Mix.compilers]

It's important to add :thrift before the :erlang entry. The Thrift compiler will generate Erlang source files, and we currently rely on this ordering to ensure those generated source files get compiled.

Next, define the list of :thrift_files that should be compiled. In this example, we gather all of the .thrift files under the thrift directory:

thrift_files: Mix.Utils.extract_files(["thrift"], [:thrift])

By default, the generated source files will be written to the src directory, but you can change that using the thrift_output option.

You can also pass additional options to the Thrift compiler by listing them in the thrift_options option:

thrift_options: ~w[-I my/include/dir]

If you require a specific version of the Thrift compiler, you can specify a version requirement using the thrift_version option. Version requirements use the SemVer 2.0 schema. For example:

thrift_version: ">= 0.9.3"  # Erlang maps support

You can also override the name of the Thrift compiler executable itself:

thrift_executable: "thrift-0.9.3"

If you get something like type set() undefined when compiling the generated files you can try:

thrift_options: ~w[--gen erl:maps]

Thrift IDL Parsing

This package also contains experimental support for parsing Thrift IDL files. For the moment, only an Erlang lexer is available, but the goal is to provide more advanced parser support over time.

:thrift_lexer.string('enum Colors { RED, GREEN, BLUE}')
{:ok,
 [{:enum, 1}, {:ident, 1, 'Colors'}, {:symbol, 1, '{'}, {:ident, 1, 'RED'},
  {:symbol, 1, ','}, {:ident, 1, 'GREEN'}, {:symbol, 1, ','},
  {:ident, 1, 'BLUE'}, {:symbol, 1, '}'}], 1}