FoundationDB is a distributed database designed to handle large volumes of structured data across clusters of commodity servers. It organizes data as an ordered key-value store and employs ACID transactions for all operations. It is especially well-suited for read/write workloads but also has excellent performance for write-intensive workloads. Users interact with the database using API language binding.
To learn more about FoundationDB, visit foundationdb.org
Documentation
Documentation can be found online at https://apple.github.io/foundationdb/. The documentation covers details of API usage, background information on design philosophy, and extensive usage examples. Docs are built from the source in this repo.
Forums
The FoundationDB Forums are the home for most of the discussion and communication about the FoundationDB project. We welcome your participation! We want FoundationDB to be a great project to be a part of and, as part of that, have established a Code of Conduct to establish what constitutes permissible modes of interaction.
Contributing
Contributing to FoundationDB can be in contributions to the code base, sharing your experience and insights in the community on the Forums, or contributing to projects that make use of FoundationDB. Please see the contributing guide for more specifics.
Getting Started
Binary downloads
Developers interested in using FoundationDB can get started by downloading and installing a binary package. Please see the downloads page for a list of available packages.
Compiling from source
Developers on an OS for which there is no binary package, or who would like to start hacking on the code, can get started by compiling from source.
The official docker image for building is foundationdb/foundationdb-build
. It has all dependencies installed. To build outside the official docker image you'll need at least these dependencies:
If compiling for local development, please set -DUSE_WERROR=ON
in
cmake. Our CI compiles with -Werror
on, so this way you'll find out about
compiler warnings that break the build earlier.
Once you have your dependencies, you can run cmake and then build:
- Check out this repository.
- Create a build directory (you can have the build directory anywhere you like). There is currently a directory in the source tree called build, but you should not use it. See #3098
cd <PATH_TO_BUILD_DIRECTORY>
cmake -G Ninja <PATH_TO_FOUNDATIONDB_DIRECTORY>
ninja # If this crashes it probably ran out of memory. Try ninja -j1
Language Bindings
The language bindings that are supported by cmake will have a corresponding
README.md
file in the corresponding bindings/lang
directory.
Generally, cmake will build all language bindings for which it can find all necessary dependencies. After each successful cmake run, cmake will tell you which language bindings it is going to build.
compile_commands.json
Generating CMake can build a compilation database for you. However, the default generated
one is not too useful as it operates on the generated files. When running make,
the build system will create another compile_commands.json
file in the source
directory. This can than be used for tools like
CCLS,
CQuery, etc. This way you can get
code-completion and code navigation in flow. It is not yet perfect (it will show
a few errors) but we are constantly working on improving the development experience.
CMake will not produce a compile_commands.json
, you must pass
-DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON
. This also enables the target
processed_compile_commands
, which rewrites compile_commands.json
to
describe the actor compiler source file, not the post-processed output files,
and places the output file in the source directory. This file should then be
picked up automatically by any tooling.
Note that if building inside of the foundationdb/foundationdb-build
docker
image, the resulting paths will still be incorrect and require manual fixing.
One will wish to re-run cmake
with -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=OFF
to
prevent it from reverting the manual changes.
Using IDEs
CMake has built in support for a number of popular IDEs. However, because flow files are precompiled with the actor compiler, an IDE will not be very useful as a user will only be presented with the generated code - which is not what she wants to edit and get IDE features for.
The good news is, that it is possible to generate project files for editing
flow with a supported IDE. There is a CMake option called OPEN_FOR_IDE
which
will generate a project which can be opened in an IDE for editing. You won't be
able to build this project, but you will be able to edit the files and get most
edit and navigation features your IDE supports.
For example, if you want to use XCode to make changes to FoundationDB you can create a XCode-project with the following command:
cmake -G Xcode -DOPEN_FOR_IDE=ON <FDB_SOURCE_DIRECTORY>
You should create a second build-directory which you will use for building and debugging.
FreeBSD
-
Check out this repo on your server.
-
Install compile-time dependencies from ports.
-
(Optional) Use tmpfs & ccache for significantly faster repeat builds
-
(Optional) Install a JDK for Java Bindings. FoundationDB currently builds with Java 8.
-
Navigate to the directory where you checked out the foundationdb repo.
-
Build from source.
sudo pkg install -r FreeBSD \ shells/bash devel/cmake devel/ninja devel/ccache \ lang/mono lang/python3 \ devel/boost-libs devel/libeio \ security/openssl mkdir .build && cd .build cmake -G Ninja \ -DUSE_CCACHE=on \ -DDISABLE_TLS=off \ -DUSE_DTRACE=off \ .. ninja -j 10 # run fast tests ctest -L fast # run all tests ctest --output-on-failure -v
Linux
There are no special requirements for Linux. A docker image can be pulled from
foundationdb/foundationdb-build
that has all of FoundationDB's dependencies
pre-installed, and is what the CI uses to build and test PRs.
cmake -G Ninja <FDB_SOURCE_DIR>
ninja
cpack -G DEB
For RPM simply replace DEB
with RPM
.
MacOS
The build under MacOS will work the same way as on Linux. To get boost and ninja you can use Homebrew.
cmake -G Ninja <PATH_TO_FOUNDATIONDB_SOURCE>
To generate a installable package,
ninja
$SRCDIR/packaging/osx/buildpkg.sh . $SRCDIR
Windows
Under Windows, the build instructions are very similar, with the main difference that Visual Studio is used to compile.
- Install Visual Studio 2017 (Community Edition is tested)
- Install cmake Version 3.12 or higher CMake
- Download version 1.72 of Boost
- Unpack boost (you don't need to compile it)
- Install Mono
- (Optional) Install a JDK. FoundationDB currently builds with Java 8
- Set
JAVA_HOME
to the unpacked location and JAVA_COMPILE to$JAVA_HOME/bin/javac
. - Install Python if it is not already installed by Visual Studio
- (Optional) Install WIX. Without it Visual Studio won't build the Windows installer
- Create a build directory (you can have the build directory anywhere you
like):
mkdir build
cd build
cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" -DBOOST_ROOT=<PATH_TO_BOOST> <PATH_TO_FOUNDATIONDB_DIRECTORY>
- This should succeed. In which case you can build using msbuild:
msbuild /p:Configuration=Release foundationdb.sln
. You can also open the resulting solution in Visual Studio and compile from there. However, be aware that using Visual Studio for development is currently not supported as Visual Studio will only know about the generated files.msbuild
is located atc:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\14.0\Bin\MSBuild.exe
for Visual Studio 15.
If you installed WIX before running cmake
you should find the
FDBInstaller.msi
in your build directory under packaging/msi
.
TODO: Re-add instructions for TLS support #3022