DEVELOPER.md

July 11, 2025 ยท View on GitHub

Developer Guide

This document describes how to set up your development environment to build and test the Valkey GLIDE C++ wrapper.

Development Overview

We're excited to share that the GLIDE Go client is currently in development! However, it's important to note that this client is a work in progress and is not yet complete or fully tested. Your contributions and feedback are highly encouraged as we work towards refining and improving this implementation. Thank you for your interest and understanding as we continue to develop this C++ wrapper.

The Valkey GLIDE C++ wrapper consists of both C++ and Rust code. The C++ and Rust components communicate in two ways:

  1. Using the protobuf protocol to establish connection.
  2. Utilizing shared C++ objects generated by cbindgen.

Build from source

Prerequisites

Software Dependencies

  • gcc
  • cmake
  • openssl
  • protobuf >= v3.20.0
  • abseil-cpp
  • pkg-config
  • python (required for benchmarking)
  • doxygen (required for generating documentation)

A shell.nix file is available to swiftly install the necessary dependencies.

Valkey installation

To install valkey-server and valkey-cli on your host, follow the Valkey Installation Guide.

Building and installation steps

Before starting this step, make sure you've installed all software requirements.

  1. Clone the repository: 
    VERSION=0.1.0 # You can modify this to other released version or set it to "main" to get the unstable branch
git clone --branch ${VERSION} https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey-glide.git
cd valkey-glide
  2. Initialize git submodule: 
    git submodule update --init --recursive
  3. Install build dependencies: 
    cd cpp
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DDEBUG_MODE=ON
make generate-proto
make generate-cbinding
export GLIDE_VERSION="dev"
export GLIDE_NAME="glide"
make prebuild
  4. Build the C++ wrapper: 
    make -j8

Test

To run tests, use the following command:

    cd cpp/build/test
    ctest --output-on-failure

For memory check, use the following command:

You must first build the sample code before running Valgrind on it.

cd examples/
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DDEBUG_MODE=ON
make -j8
valgrind --leak-check=full --show-leak-kinds=all --track-origins=yes ./glide-cpp-sample

Submodules

After pulling new changes, ensure that you update the submodules by running the following command:

git submodule update

Generate protobuf files

If modifications are made to the protobuf definition files (.proto files located in glide-core/src/protobuf), it becomes necessary to regenerate the Go protobuf files. To do so, run:

make generate-proto

Language-specific Linters

  • valgrind

Running the linters

Run from the main /cpp folder

make lint

Benchmarks

To run the benchmarks, ensure you have followed the build and installation steps (the tests do not have to be run). Then execute the following:

cd cpp/benchmarks
python benchmarks.py

Generating documentation

cd docs
git clone https://github.com/jothepro/doxygen-awesome-css.git
doxygen Doxyfile

You'll get the generated documentation in the output/html folder.