Time for action – getting and installing Avro

Let's download Avro and get it installed on our system.

1. Download the latest stable version of Avro from http://avro.apache.org/releases.html.

2. Download the latest version of the ParaNamer library from http://paranamer.codehaus.org.

3. Add the classes to the build classpath used by the Java compiler.

   $ export CLASSPATH=avro-1.7.2.jar:${CLASSPATH}
   $ export CLASSPATH=avro-mapred-1.7.2.jar:${CLASSPATH}
   $ export CLASSPATH=paranamer-2.5.jar:${CLASSPATH
   

4. Add existing JAR files from the Hadoop distribution to the build classpath.

   Export CLASSPATH=${HADOOP_HOME}/lib/Jackson-core-asl-1.8.jar:${CLASSPATH}
   Export CLASSPATH=${HADOOP_HOME}/lib/Jackson-mapred-asl-1.8.jar:${CLASSPATH}
   Export CLASSPATH=${HADOOP_HOME}/lib/commons-cli-1.2.jar:${CLASSPATH}
   

5. Add the new JAR files to the Hadoop lib directory.

   $cpavro-1.7.2.jar ${HADOOP_HOME}/lib
   $cpavro-1.7.2.jar ${HADOOP_HOME}/lib
   $cpavro-mapred-1.7.2.jar ${HADOOP_HOME}/lib
   

What just happened?

Setting up Avro is a little...