This library provides a C interface to Hashicorp's Go implementation of the Raft consensus algorithm for distributed systems. The other component of the interface is the Go package raft_if, which links against this library and is built by this Makefile.
NOTE: libraft is still very developmental, and should not be used in production at this point. The API will certainly be undergoing significant change, and the project could perhaps use a better name as well.
Production-grade Raft implementations usable outside Go or the JVM seem to be in short supply. This presents Raft as a C library with a simple API, to bridge that gap.
Internally, the Raft implementation runs in a child process, communicating via shared memory to minimize memory copies and overhead.
- C++11 compiler; tested with Clang 3.5 and GCC 4.8
- Go 1.4 (possibly other versions)
- Boost
- Linux or Mac OS X; not tested on other Unix platforms
If you don't have a Go workspace
set up, do that first. Then set the GOPATH environment variable to
point to it, and add $GOPATH/bin to your PATH.
Then simply run make to check out the libraft submodules and
raft_if and build all of it.
Run a simple demo program with make run_client, or the tests with
make test.
The API is in raft_c_if.h and raft_defs.h. It's meant to mirror the Go API for the underlying implementation, which doesn't exactly excuse the lack of documentation... Again, the API is very much a work in progress.
raft_client.c is a fairly minimal example of a client program, providing a simple finite state machine that counts letters and a driver that communicates with it via Raft.
Standalone, non-persistent interactive use:
$ ./raft_client --single -i
And with persistent state:
$ ./raft_client --dir /tmp/raft -i
Or, run an actual Raft cluster:
./raft_client --dir /tmp/raft_A --port 9001 --peers localhost:9002,localhost:9003 -i
./raft_client --dir /tmp/raft_B --port 9002 --peers localhost:9003,localhost:9001 -i
./raft_client --dir /tmp/raft_C --port 9003 --peers localhost:9001,localhost:9002 -i