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Using Arrow C++ in your own project

docs/source/cpp/build_system.rst

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.. Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one .. or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file .. distributed with this work for additional information .. regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file .. to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the .. "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance .. with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

.. http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

.. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, .. software distributed under the License is distributed on an .. "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY .. KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the .. specific language governing permissions and limitations .. under the License.

.. default-domain:: cpp .. highlight:: cpp

=================================== Using Arrow C++ in your own project

This section assumes you already have the Arrow C++ libraries on your system, either after installing them using a package manager <https://arrow.apache.org/install/>_ or after :ref:building them yourself <building-arrow-cpp>.

The recommended way to integrate the Arrow C++ libraries in your own C++ project is to use CMake's find_package <https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/command/find_package.html>_ function for locating and integrating dependencies. If you don't use CMake as a build system, you can use pkg-config <https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/pkg-config/>_ to find installed the Arrow C++ libraries.

CMake

Basic usage

This minimal CMakeLists.txt file compiles a my_example.cc source file into an executable linked with the Arrow C++ shared library:

.. code-block:: cmake

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.25)

project(MyExample)

find_package(Arrow REQUIRED)

add_executable(my_example my_example.cc) target_link_libraries(my_example PRIVATE Arrow::arrow_shared)

Available variables and targets

The directive find_package(Arrow REQUIRED) asks CMake to find an Arrow C++ installation on your system. When it returns, it will have set a few CMake variables:

  • ${Arrow_FOUND} is true if the Arrow C++ libraries have been found
  • ${ARROW_VERSION} contains the Arrow version string
  • ${ARROW_FULL_SO_VERSION} contains the Arrow DLL version string

In addition, it will have created some targets that you can link against (note these are plain strings, not variables):

  • Arrow::arrow_shared links to the Arrow shared libraries
  • Arrow::arrow_static links to the Arrow static libraries

For backwards compatibility purposes the arrow_shared and arrow_static targets are also available but we recommend using Arrow::arrow_shared and Arrow::arrow_static respectively.

In most cases, it is recommended to use the Arrow shared libraries.

If Arrow is installed on a custom path instead of a common system one you will have to add the path where Arrow is installed to CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH.

CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH can be defined as a CMake variable <https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/variable/CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH.html>_ or an environment variable <https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/envvar/CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH.html>_.

Your system might already have a CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH environment variable defined, use the following to expand it with the path to your Arrow installation. In this case ARROW_ROOT is expected to contain the path to your Arrow installation:

.. code-block:: shell

export CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=${ARROW_ROOT}${CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH:+:${CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH}}

In the case of using a CMake variable you can add it when configuring the project like the following to contain the possible existing CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH environment variable:

.. code-block:: shell

cmake ... -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=${ARROW_ROOT}${CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH:+:${CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH}}

.. note:: The usage of COMPONENTS on our find_package implementation is currently not supported.

Other available packages

There are other available packages, they can also be used with the find_package <https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/command/find_package.html>_ directive. This is the list of available packages:

  • ArrowCUDA
  • ArrowAcero
  • ArrowCompute
  • ArrowDataset
  • ArrowFlight
  • ArrowFlightSql
  • ArrowFlightTesting
  • ArrowSubstrait
  • ArrowTesting
  • Gandiva
  • Parquet

Usage with find_package and target names follows a consistent naming pattern:

  • find_package usage: find_package(PackageName REQUIRED)
  • Shared Target: PackageName::package_name_shared
  • Static Target: PackageName::package_name_static

For example, to use the ArrowCompute package:

  • find_package Usage: find_package(ArrowCompute REQUIRED)
  • Shared Target: ArrowCompute::arrow_compute_shared
  • Static Target: ArrowCompute::arrow_compute_static

.. note:: CMake is case-sensitive. The names and variables listed above have to be spelt exactly that way!

.. seealso:: A Docker-based :doc:minimal build example <examples/cmake_minimal_build>.

pkg-config

Basic usage

You can get suitable build flags by the following command line:

.. code-block:: shell

pkg-config --cflags --libs arrow

If you want to link the Arrow C++ static library, you need to add --static option:

.. code-block:: shell

pkg-config --cflags --libs --static arrow

This minimal Makefile file compiles a my_example.cc source file into an executable linked with the Arrow C++ shared library:

.. code-block:: makefile

my_example: my_example.cc $(CXX) -o $@ $(CXXFLAGS) $< $$(pkg-config --cflags --libs arrow)

Many build systems support pkg-config. For example:

  • GNU Autotools <https://people.freedesktop.org/~dbn/pkg-config-guide.html#using>_
  • CMake <https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/module/FindPkgConfig.html>_ (But you should use find_package(Arrow) instead.)
  • Meson <https://mesonbuild.com/Reference-manual.html#dependency>_

Available packages

The Arrow C++ provides a pkg-config package for each module. Here are all available packages:

  • arrow-csv
  • arrow-cuda
  • arrow-dataset
  • arrow-filesystem
  • arrow-flight-testing
  • arrow-flight
  • arrow-json
  • arrow-orc
  • arrow-python-flight
  • arrow-python
  • arrow-tensorflow
  • arrow-testing
  • arrow
  • gandiva
  • parquet

A Note on Linking

Some Arrow components have dependencies that you may want to use in your own project. Care must be taken to ensure that your project links the same version of these dependencies in the same way (statically or dynamically) as Arrow, else ODR <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Definition_Rule>_ violations may result and your program may crash or silently corrupt data.

In particular, Arrow Flight and its dependencies Protocol Buffers (Protobuf) <https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/>_ and gRPC <https://grpc.io/>_ are likely to cause issues. When using Arrow Flight, note the following guidelines:

  • If statically linking Arrow Flight, Protobuf and gRPC must also be statically linked, and the same goes for dynamic linking.
  • Some platforms (e.g. Ubuntu 20.04 at the time of this writing) may ship a version of Protobuf and/or gRPC that is not recent enough for Arrow Flight. In that case, Arrow Flight bundles these dependencies, so care must be taken not to mix the Arrow Flight library with the platform Protobuf/gRPC libraries (as then you will have two versions of Protobuf and/or gRPC linked into your application).

It may be easiest to depend on a version of Arrow built from source, where you can control the source of each dependency and whether it is statically or dynamically linked. See :doc:/developers/cpp/building for instructions. Or alternatively, use Arrow from a package manager such as Conda or vcpkg which will manage consistent versions of Arrow and its dependencies.

.. _download-timezone-database:

Runtime Dependencies

On most platforms, Arrow uses the OS-provided timezone database. However, when built with Clang/libc++ on Windows, Arrow requires a user-provided IANA timezone database.

To download the timezone database for libc++ builds, you must download and extract the text version of the IANA timezone database and add the Windows timezone mapping XML. To download, you can use the following batch script:

.. code-block:: batch

curl https://data.iana.org/time-zones/tzdata-latest.tar.gz --output tzdata.tar.gz mkdir tzdata tar --extract --file tzdata.tar.gz --directory tzdata move tzdata %USERPROFILE%\Downloads\tzdata @rem Also need Windows timezone mapping curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/unicode-org/cldr/master/common/supplemental/windowsZones.xml ^ --output %USERPROFILE%\Downloads\tzdata\windowsZones.xml

By default, the timezone database will be detected at %USERPROFILE%\Downloads\tzdata, but you can set a custom path at runtime in :struct:arrow::GlobalOptions::

arrow::GlobalOptions options; options.timezone_db_path = "path/to/tzdata"; ARROW_RETURN_NOT_OK(arrow::Initialize(options));