Using Apache Thrift with Maven

When you use Thrift for your project, you have to manually generate the sources, put them inside your source folder and build.

This plugin does the work for you when you execute the maven build.

However, this plugin is not yet available on maven central repositories, therefore you have to add developer's repo. to your project pom.

 
    <pluginRepositories>
        <pluginRepository>
            <id>dtrotts</id>
            <name>Repository for maven thrift plugin</name>
            <url>http://maven.davidtrott.com/repository</url>
            <layout>default</layout>
        </pluginRepository>
    </pluginRepositories>
 

Then, as described in the plugin's project page, you have to:

1. Use Java 1.5 or newer due to the usage of Generics

You can specify it in the configuration of maven compiler plugin:

 
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
                <configuration>
                    <source>1.6</source>
                    <target>1.6</target>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
            ...
 

2. Have Thrift executable is in your PATH or set the parameter of the plugin to the correct location.

 
            <plugin>
                <groupId>org.apache.thrift.tools</groupId>
                <artifactId>maven-thrift-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>0.1.10</version>
                <configuration>
                    <thriftExecutable>/usr/local/bin/thrift
                </configuration>
                ...
 

3. Include the dependency for libthrift

 
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.thrift</groupId>
            <artifactId>libthrift</artifactId>
            <version>0.8.0</version>
        </dependency>
 

Then place your *.thrift files to the directory: src/main/thrift.

Now you can execute mvn clean install as usual.