Bigtop is a project for the development of packaging and tests of the Apache Hadoop ecosystem.

The primary goal of Bigtop is to build a community around the packaging and interoperability testing of Hadoop-related projects. This includes testing at various levels (packaging, platform, runtime, upgrade, etc...) developed by a community with a focus on the system as a whole, rather than individual projects.

Packages have been built on Ubuntu 10.10, CentOS 5 and openSUSE 11.4. They can probably be built on other platforms as well.

Building Bigtop requires the following tools:

• Java JDK 1.6
• Apache Forrest 0.8 (requires 32bit version of Java JDK 1.5)
• Apache Ant
• Apache Maven
• git
• subversion
• autoconf
• automake
• liblzo2-dev
• libz-dev
• sharutils
• libfuse-dev

On Debian-based systems one also needs

• build-essential dh-make debhelper devscripts
• reprepro

$ make [component-name]-[rpm|deb]

$ make [component-name]-[yum|apt]

WARNING: since testing packages requires installing them on a live system it is highly recommended to use VMs for that.

Testing Bigtop is done using iTest framework. For more documentation on iTest visit the iTest page but here's 2 steps to get started:

• install package testing iTest artifacts locally:

    cd test/src/smokes/package/ && mvn install -DskipTests -DskipITs -DperformRelease
  

• use those locally installed iTest package testing artifacts to run a suite:

    cd test/suites/package/ && mvn clean verify -Dcdh.repo.file.url.CentOS=XXX  -D'org.apache.maven-failsafe-plugin.testInclude=**/TestPackagesReadiness.*'
  

You can get in touch with us on the user list or developer list.