Pulsar C clients support a variety of Pulsar features to enable building applications connecting to your Pulsar cluster.

For the supported Pulsar features, see Client Feature Matrix.

For how to use APIs to publish and consume messages, see examples.

Navigate to vcpkg-example for how to import the pulsar-client-cpp into your project via vcpkg.

For non-vcpkg projects, you can download pre-built binaries from the official release page.

Pulsar C client uses doxygen to build API documents. After installing doxygen, you only need to run doxygen to generate the API documents whose main page is under the doxygen/html/index.html path.

Since it's integrated with vcpkg, see vcpkg#README for the requirements. See LEGACY_BUILD if you want to manage dependencies by yourself or you cannot install vcpkg in your own environment.

The simplest way is to clone this project with the vcpkg submodule.

git clone https://github.com/apache/pulsar-client-cpp.git
cd pulsar-client-cpp
git submodule update --init --recursive
cmake -B build -DINTEGRATE_VCPKG=ON
cmake --build build -j8

The 1st step will download vcpkg and then install all dependencies according to the version description in vcpkg.json. The 2nd step will build the Pulsar C libraries under ./build/lib/, where ./build is the CMake build directory.

You can also add the CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE option if your system already have vcpkg installed.

git clone https://github.com/apache/pulsar-client-cpp.git
cd pulsar-client-cpp
# For example, you can install vcpkg in /tmp/vcpkg
cd /tmp && git clone https://github.com/microsoft/vcpkg.git && cd -
cmake -B build -DINTEGRATE_VCPKG=ON -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE="/tmp/vcpkg/scripts/buildsystems/vcpkg.cmake"
cmake --build build -j8

After the build, the hierarchy of the build directory will be:

build/
  include/   -- extra C   headers
  lib/       -- libraries
  tests/     -- test executables
  examples/  -- example executables
  generated/
    lib/     -- protobuf source files for PulsarApi.proto
    tests/   -- protobuf source files for *.proto used in tests

To install the C headers and libraries into a specific path, e.g. /tmp/pulsar, run the following commands:

cmake -B build -DINTEGRATE_VCPKG=ON -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/tmp/pulsar
cmake --build build -j8 --target install

For example, on macOS you will see:

/tmp/pulsar/
  include/pulsar     -- C/C   headers
  lib/
    libpulsar.a      -- Static library
    libpulsar.dylib  -- Dynamic library

Tests are built by default. You should execute run-unit-tests.sh to run tests locally.

If you don't want to build the tests, disable the BUILD_TESTS option:

cmake -B build -DINTEGRATE_VCPKG=ON -DBUILD_TESTS=OFF
cmake --build build -j8

If you want to build the perf tools, enable the BUILD_PERF_TOOLS option:

cmake -B build -DINTEGRATE_VCPKG=ON -DBUILD_PERF_TOOLS=ON
cmake --build build -j8

Then the perf tools will be built under ./build/perf/.

Pulsar C Client Library has been tested on:

• Linux
• Mac OS X
• Windows x64

See the wireshark directory for details.

It's required to install LLVM for clang-tidy and clang-format. Pulsar C client use clang-format 11 to format files. make format automatically formats the files.

For Ubuntu users, you can install clang-format-11 via apt install clang-format-11. For other users, run ./build-support/docker-format.sh if you have Docker installed.

We welcome contributions from the open source community, kindly make sure your changes are backward compatible with GCC 4.8 and Boost 1.53.

If your contribution adds Pulsar features for C clients, you need to update both the Pulsar docs and the Client Feature Matrix. See Contribution Guide for more details.