foundationdb/README.md

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 the FoundationDB store for an application can get started easily by downloading and installing a binary package. Please see the downloads page for a list of available packages.

Compiling from source

Developers on a 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.

CMake (Experimental)

FoundationDB is currently in the process of migrating the build system to cmake. The CMake build system is currently used by several developers. However, most of the testing and packaging infrastructure still uses the old VisualStudio+Make based build system.

To build with CMake, generally the following is required (works on Linux and Mac OS - for Windows see below):

1. git clone https://github.com/apple/foundationdb.git
2. mkdir build
3. cd build
4. cmake ../foundationdb
5. make

CMake will try to find its dependencies. However, for LibreSSL this can be often problematic (especially if OpenSSL is installed as well). For that we recommend passing the argument -DLibreSSL_ROOT to cmake. So, for example, if you LibreSSL is installed under /usr/local/libressl-2.8.3, you should call cmake like this:

cmake -DLibreSSL_ROOT=/usr/local/libressl-2.8.3/ ../foundationdb

macOS

1. Check out this repo on your Mac.
2. Install the Xcode command-line tools.
3. Download version 1.52 of Boost.
4. Set the BOOSTDIR environment variable to the location containing this boost installation.
5. Install Mono.
6. Install a JDK. FoundationDB currently builds with Java 8.
7. Navigate to the directory where you checked out the foundationdb repo.
8. Run make.

Linux

1. Install Docker.

2. Check out the foundationdb repo.

3. Build Linux docker image using the file Dockerfile located in the build source directory.

   cd /dir/path/foundationdb
   docker build ./build -t <image-tag-name>
   

4. Run the docker image interactively Docker Run with the directory containing the foundationdb repo mounted Docker Mounts.

   docker run -it -v '/local/dir/path/foundationdb:/docker/dir/path/foundationdb' <image-tag-name> /bin/bash
   

5. Navigate to the container's mounted directory which contains the foundationdb repo.

   cd /docker/dir/path/foundationdb
   

6. Run make.

This will build the fdbserver binary and the python bindings. If you want to build our other bindings, you will need to install a runtime for the language whose binding you want to build. Each binding has an .mk file which provides specific targets for that binding.

Windows (Experimental)

The Windows build is currently experimental and the creation of installers is not yet supported.

1. Install Visual Studio 2017 (Community Edition is tested)
2. Install cmake (>= 3.12)
3. Download OpenJDK (>= 8) and unpack it somewhere
4. Set JAVA_HOME to the unpacked location and JAVA_COMPILE to $JAVA_HOME/bin/javac
5. Download boost 1.67 (this exact version is required)
6. Unpack boost (in our example we use C:\boost_1_67 - but you can chose any other location)
7. Open the Developer Command Prompt for VS 2017
8. Run cmake like this: cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" -DBOOST_ROOT=C:\boost_167_0 Z:\Projects\foundationdb
9. This should succeed. In which case you can build using msbuild: msbuild /p:Configuration=Release fdb.sln

If you want TLS support to be enabled under Windows you currently have to build and install LibreSSL yourself as the newer LibreSSL versions are not provided for download from the LibreSSL homepage. To build LibreSSL:

1. Download and unpack libressl (>= 2.8.2)
2. cd libressl-2.8.2
3. mkdir build
4. cd build
5. cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" ..
6. Open the generated LibreSSL.sln in Visual Studio as administrator (this is necessary for the install)
7. Build the INSTALL project in Release mode

This will install LibreSSL under C:\Program Files\LibreSSL. After that cmake will automatically find it and build with TLS support.

You can also open the generated solution file in Visual Studio and build from there. However, working on FDB in Visual Studio is currently not supported (as Visual Studio currently only sees the generated files).