This is an incomplete and essentially dead project. Its failure point was being too complicated too fast. I wrote a simple hack to hold me over till this got far enough along and it turns out the hack got me far enough along I never finished this
Sadly no, I dont rememeber exactly what the hack was I wrote this years ago and it died with my company laptop
Apache Thrift is a language agnostic framework that enables typed communication between services.
Thrift explorer is intended to be a tool aimed at developers who use thrift services. Enabling the user to explore their services without having to write or maintain any code.
I am still finding fundemental issues with the implementation and am working though them. Slowly but surely
You place your service thrifts in a directory and configure Thrift Explorer to pull from it. Then make http calls to Thrift Explorer providing information such as host/port and it will forward your request to it and return the response.
Example calls are provided as part of a Postman Collection. However, Lets walk though a basic session.
If you are working on a todo thrift service that you have running on your machine you can use thrift explorer to make calls to it. With the todo server running you add the todo thrifts to thrift explorer and start the server. (I will be using curl to make requests and jq to pretty print the responses)
You can see what services are loaded
curl -Ss localhost:5000 | jq '.'
{
"thrifts": [
{
"thrift": "Batman.thrift",
"service": "BatPuter",
"methods": [
"ping",
"getVillain",
"addVillain",
"saveCase"
]
},
{
"thrift": "todo.thrift",
"service": "TodoService",
"methods": [
"ping",
"listTasks",
"numTasks",
"getTask",
"createTask",
"completeTask",
"fancyNewMethod"
]
}
]
}List the methods of a particular service
curl -Ss localhost:5000/todo/TodoService/ | jq '.'
{
"thrift": "todo.thrift",
"service": "TodoService",
"methods": [
"ping",
"listTasks",
"numTasks",
"getTask",
"createTask",
"completeTask",
"fancyNewMethod"
]
}Make a call to one of the methods of that service (the response is in the "data" field of the response body)
curl -Ss -X POST \
http://localhost:5000/todo/TodoService/createTask/ \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
"host": "localhost",
"port": 6000,
"protocol": "tbinaryprotocol",
"transport": "tbufferedtransport",
"request_body": {"description": "task 1", "dueDate": "12-12-2012"}
}' | jq "."
{
"status": "Success",
"request": {
"thrift_file": "todo.thrift",
"service_name": "TodoService",
"endpoint_name": "createTask",
"host": "localhost",
"port": 6000,
"protocol": "tbinaryprotocol",
"transport": "tbufferedtransport",
"request_body": {
"description": "task 1",
"dueDate": "12-12-2012"
}
},
"data": {
"__thrift_struct_class__": "Task",
"taskId": "1",
"description": "task 1",
"dueDate": "12-12-2012"
},
"time_to_make_request": "0:00:00.008794",
"time_to_connect": "0:00:00.001502"
}and just for fun we will make another call
curl -Ss -X POST \
http://localhost:5000/todo/TodoService/getTask/ \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
"host": "localhost",
"port": 6000,
"protocol": "tbinaryprotocol",
"transport": "tbufferedtransport",
"request_body": {"taskId": "1"}
}' | jq "."
{
"status": "Success",
"request": {
"thrift_file": "todo.thrift",
"service_name": "TodoService",
"endpoint_name": "getTask",
"host": "localhost",
"port": 6000,
"protocol": "tbinaryprotocol",
"transport": "tbufferedtransport",
"request_body": {
"taskId": "1"
}
},
"data": {
"__thrift_struct_class__": "Task",
"taskId": "1",
"description": "task 1",
"dueDate": "12-12-2012"
},
"time_to_make_request": "0:00:00.001283",
"time_to_connect": "0:00:00.000554"
}If you make a mistake making a request thrift explorer tries to be helpful telling you the mistake you made
curl -sS -X POST \
http://localhost:5000/todo/TodoService/completeTask/ \
-d '{
"host": "localhost",
"port": 6000,
"protocol": "tbinaryprotocol",
"transport": "tbufferedtransport",
"request_body": {"description": "task 1"}
}' | jq '.'
{
"errors": [
{
"code": "ErrorCode.REQUIRED_FIELD_MISSING",
"message": "Required Field 'taskId' not found",
"arg_spec": {
"name": "taskId",
"required": true,
"type_info": {"ttype": "string"},
},
}
]
}and if you just want to get the thrift itself you can do that to
curl -Ss localhost:5000/todo/
include "basethrifts/Exceptions.thrift"
struct Task {
1: optional string taskId;
2: optional string description;
3: optional string dueDate;
}
service TodoService {
void ping();
list<Task> listTasks();
i64 numTasks();
Task getTask(1: string taskId) throws (1: Exceptions.NotFound notfound);
Task createTask(1: string description, 2: string dueDate);
void completeTask(1: required string taskId) throws (1: Exceptions.NotFound notfound);
void fancyNewMethod(); // Not implemented by the server to simulate that kind of error
}If you are comfortable with python environments and python packaging you can install this with pip. I suggest using a virtual environment.
pip install thrift-explorer
Then you may either use the flask development server or you can install a wsgi server. I am going to use gunicorn
pip install gunicorn
Then you set the environment variables you will use to configure the server. See Configuring the server for details. At a minimum you must set THRIFT_DIRECTORY
export THRIFT_DIRECTORY=$(pwd)/example-thrifts/
Then start it!
gunicorn -b 127.0.0.1:5000 thrift_explorer.wsgi
[2018-10-07 12:01:30 -0400] [7864] [INFO] Starting gunicorn 19.9.0
[2018-10-07 12:01:30 -0400] [7864] [INFO] Listening at: http://127.0.0.1:5000 (7864)
[2018-10-07 12:01:30 -0400] [7864] [INFO] Using worker: sync
[2018-10-07 12:01:30 -0400] [7867] [INFO] Booting worker with pid: 7867
If you would rather not work with the python directly you can pull down a docker container
docker pull bachmann1234/thrift-explorer
When running the docker container you are going to need to pass in a directory containing the thrifts the server will load in. This will be provided via the source parameter. In the example below I pass in the example-thrifts directory in this very repo
docker run --mount type=bind,source=$(pwd)/example-thrifts,target=/thrifts -p 5000:80 bachmann1234/thrift-explorer
In english this command is saying "run the thrift-explorer server with example-thrifts as its thrift directory. Make it so that server is accessible to me at port 8000". You can also pass in other environment variables in this command to configure the server. See Configuring the server for details.
For a more detailed explanation of the docker command consult the docker documentation
One gotcha: When using the docker container you need to be mindful of how networking works with docker. For example. If you are running thrift-explorer with the docker container and you need it to access a service running on your localhost you would use the hostname "host.docker.internal" (at least on docker-for-mac). For example
curl -Ss -X POST \
http://localhost:4000/todo/TodoService/createTask/ \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-d '{
"host": "host.docker.internal",
"port": 6000,
"protocol": "tbinaryprotocol",
"transport": "tbufferedtransport",
"request_body": {"description": "task 1", "dueDate": "12-12-2012"}
}' | jq "."
{
"status": "Success",
"request": {
"thrift_file": "todo.thrift",
"service_name": "TodoService",
"endpoint_name": "createTask",
"host": "host.docker.internal",
"port": 6000,
"protocol": "tbinaryprotocol",
"transport": "tbufferedtransport",
"request_body": {
"description": "task 1",
"dueDate": "12-12-2012"
}
},
"data": {
"__thrift_struct_class__": "Task",
"taskId": "2",
"description": "task 1",
"dueDate": "12-12-2012"
},
"time_to_make_request": "0:00:00.012562",
"time_to_connect": "0:00:00.001214"
}The service is configured via environment variables
| Variable | Description | Default | Required |
|---|---|---|---|
| THRIFT_DIRECTORY | The directory where the thrifts you want the server to be aware of are stored | Yes | |
| DEFAULT_THRIFT_PROTOCOL | What thrift protocol should the server assume if one is not provided | TBinaryProtocol | No |
| DEFAULT_THRIFT_TRANSPORT | What thrift transport should the server assume if one is not provided | TBufferedTransport | No |
This repo contains some example thrifts and one example thrift service. See Todo Thrift for a service definition.
To run it just set your pythonpath appropriately (see My environment for how I setup my environment (I use fish shell)). Then run
python tests/todoserver/service.py
This service is intended as a development/testing aid. It is not required for using thrift explorer