Hue is both a web UI for Hadoop and a framework to create interactive web applications. It features a FileBrowser for accessing HDFS, JobSub and JobBrowser applications for submitting and viewing MapReduce jobs, a Beeswax application for interacting with Hive. On top of that, the web frontend is mostly built from declarative widgets that require no JavaScript and are easy to learn.

The "core" stuff is in desktop/core/, whereas installable apps live in apps/. Please place third-party dependencies in the app's ext-py/ directory.

The typical directory structure for inside an application includes:

src/

for Python code

conf/

for configuration (.ini) files to be installed

static/

for static HTML and js resources

templates/

for data to be put through a template engine

docs/

for helpful notes

The python code is structured simply as module/package.py, where module may be "filebrowser" or "jobsub". Because it is unlikely that there are going to be huge conflicts, we're going without a deep nested hierarchy.

core/src/desktop/urls.py contains the current layout for top-level URLs. For the URLs within your application, you should make your own urls.py which will be automatically rooted at /yourappname/ in the global namespace. See apps/hello/src/hello/urls.py for an example.

1. On your host system, you need to have the python "virtualenv" package installed.

2. Also, you'll need these library development packages installed on your system:

   Debian:

   • gcc
   • libmysqlclient-dev
   • libsqlite3-dev
   • libxml2-dev
   • libxslt-dev
   • python-dev
   • python-setuptools

   CentOS:

   • gcc
   • libxml2-devel
   • libxslt-devel
   • mysql
   • mysql-devel
   • python-devel
   • python-setuptools
   • python-simplejson (for the crepo tool)
   • sqlite-devel

   MacOS (mac port):

   • liblxml
   • libxml2
   • libxslt
   • mysql5-devel
   • simplejson (easy_install)
   • sqlite3

3. You need to have crepo installed, and preferably on your path. If it is not on your path, set the environment variable CREPO to point to crepo.py from that distribution. You can clone crepo from http://github.com/cloudera/crepo.git somewhere else on your system.

To build and get the core server running (without any helper daemons):

$ export HADOOP_HOME=<path-to-hadoop-home>
$ git clone http://github.com/cloudera/hue.git
$ cd hue
$ make apps
$ build/env/bin/desktop runserver_plus

Now Hue should be running on http://localhost:8000.

In order to start up a pseudodistributed cluster with the plugins enabled, run:

$ ./tools/scripts/configure-hadoop.sh all

After doing so, running jps should show all the daemons running (NN, JT, TT, DN) and you should be able to see the web UI on http://localhost:50030/ and http://localhost:50070/.

1: What does "Exception: no app!" mean?

Your template has an error in it. Check for messages from the server that look like:

INFO:root:Processing exception: Unclosed tag 'if'. Looking for one of: else, endif

2: What do I do if I get "There was an error launching ..."?

Turn on debugging by issuing dbug.cookie() in a Firebug console.

If you need to name your urls (http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#naming-url-patterns) because there's ambiguity in the view, be sure to prefix the name with the application name. The url name namespace is global. So jobsub.list is fine, but list is not.

Hue is using Django 1.1, which supports the notion of URL namespaces: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/http/urls/#url-namespaces. We have yet to move over our URLs to this construct. Brownie points for the developer who takes this on.

Right now, we check in the generated thrift code. To generate the code, you'll need the thrift binary. Compile it like so:

$ git clone http://github.com/dreiss/thrift.git
$ cd thrift
$ ./bootstrap.sh
$ ./configure --with-py=no --with-java=no --with-perl=no --prefix=$HOME/pub

We exclude python, java, and perl because they don't like to install in prefix. If you look around at configure's --help, there are environment variables that determine where those runtime bindings are installed. :

$ make && make install

When preparing .thrift files, you can use she-bangs to generate the python bindings like so:

#!/usr/bin/env thrift -r --gen py:new_style -o ../../../