Learning Apache Drill

Chapter 10. Setting Up Your Development Environment

If you plan to develop code for Drill, you will need to set up a Java development environment. You will find it convenient to create two kinds of projects. The first is a clone of the Drill source code. Often you will need to reference Drill code to find how to accomplish a task.

The next two chapters describe how to create user-defined functions and format plug-ins. It is often easiest to debug your custom code as part of the Drill build so that you can get rapid edit-compile-debug cycles, create unit tests, and so on. Later, when your code is stable, you have the option to package the code into the second kind of project: an extension project separate from Drill.

Drill makes use of Maven for the build-and-test process. A detailed description of Maven operations is beyond the scope of this book, but we do cover how to install it for Drill development.

Installing Maven

To develop Drill extensions, you need JDK version 1.8 (as of Drill 1.13) installed on your computer. For information on how to install this, see Chapter 2. In addition to the JDK, you will also need to install Maven version 3.3.1 or greater. On Linux machines, you can easily install Maven using yum or apt-get, and on Macs, you can install it using brew.

On Windows, installation is a little more complex. You first must download Maven from the Apache Software Foundation page and unzip it. After you’ve unzipped it, move the uncompressed file to C:\Program Files\Apache\Maven ...