Introduction

ThriftErlSkel is a nice sidekick for creating Thrift services in Erlang. A script created by Todd Lipcon who also created the Erlang bindings for Thrift, ThriftErlSkel provides a programming environment as using makefiles, and skeleton-code for your service.

Features

• Generates server stubs -
• Hot-swapping code - no need to restart the service
  
  

Getting started / Tutorial

Download this:

http://github.com/toddlipcon/thrift_erl_skel/tree/master

First thing you want to do is execute that perl script so do:./make_new_thrift.pl example Example 9090

• example - This is name of your thrift file without the extension, a thrift file should be in the same directory as the perl script
• Example - Probably the class level name
• 9090 - port feel free to change it
  

Make sure you've taken the lib/erl/ directory in the thrift source code and placed it in the same directory as the thrift_skel. Run make on it, we need it compiled for this to work.

Next make an rpc directory somewhere, I made mine a directory *above* where my thrift_skel, thrift directories are. Call it whatever you want, I called mine /rpc/. Now you want to edit /example/gen/Makefile. And change the path of RPC_DIR to where you actually have it or you will definitely run into errors.

Now it's fun time, go into your example/src/ and start editing your example_service.erl with any function you want, remember to export it. A simple one would be: add(A,B) -> A+B. The export at the top of the file below handler_function one would be: add/2

Jump back into root directory of your example folder, not the src folder. Run make. Everytime you change code, you must run make but you do not have to restart your service, Todd made it awesome with code reloading, we'll go into that.

Now run: sudo ./start_example.sh and the service should start running with a pseudo console for you to reload code and even test your own service. Press enter and type: example_service:add(1,3).

Hopefully it works and you see the output of the result.