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Pulsar C++ client

You can use a Pulsar C++ client to create producers, consumers, and readers.

All the methods in producer, consumer, and reader of a C++ client are thread-safe. You can read the API docs for the C++ client.

Installation​

Use one of the following methods to install a Pulsar C++ client.

Brew​

Use Homebrew to install the latest tagged version with the library and headers:

brew install libpulsar

Deb​

  1. Download any one of the Deb packages:
wget https://archive.apache.org/dist/pulsar/pulsar-2.9.4/DEB/apache-pulsar-client.deb

This package contains shared libraries libpulsar.so and libpulsarnossl.so.

  1. Install the package using the following command:
apt install ./apache-pulsar-client*.deb

Now, you can see Pulsar C++ client libraries installed under the /usr/lib directory.

RPM​

  1. Download any one of the RPM packages:
wget https://archive.apache.org/dist/pulsar/pulsar-2.9.4/RPMS/apache-pulsar-client-2.9.4-1.x86_64.rpm

This package contains shared libraries: libpulsar.so and libpulsarnossl.so.

  1. Install the package using the following command:
rpm -ivh apache-pulsar-client*.rpm

Now, you can see Pulsar C++ client libraries installed under the /usr/lib directory.

note

If you get an error like "libpulsar.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory" when starting a Pulsar client, you need to run ldconfig first.

Source​

For how to build Pulsar C++ client on different platforms from source code, see compliation.

Connection URLs​

To connect Pulsar using client libraries, you need to specify a Pulsar protocol URL.

Pulsar protocol URLs are assigned to specific clusters, you can use the Pulsar URI scheme. The default port is 6650. The following is an example for localhost.


pulsar://localhost:6650

In a Pulsar cluster in production, the URL looks as follows.


pulsar://pulsar.us-west.example.com:6650

If you use TLS authentication, you need to add ssl, and the default port is 6651. The following is an example.


pulsar+ssl://pulsar.us-west.example.com:6651

Create a consumer​

To use Pulsar as a consumer, you need to create a consumer on the C++ client. There are two main ways of using the consumer:

Blocking example​

The benefit of this approach is that it is the simplest code. Simply keeps calling receive(msg) which blocks until a message is received.

This example starts a subscription at the earliest offset and consumes 100 messages.


#include <pulsar/Client.h>

using namespace pulsar;

int main() {
    Client client("pulsar://localhost:6650");

    Consumer consumer;
    ConsumerConfiguration config;
    config.setSubscriptionInitialPosition(InitialPositionEarliest);
    Result result = client.subscribe("persistent://public/default/my-topic", "consumer-1", config, consumer);
    if (result != ResultOk) {
        std::cout << "Failed to subscribe: " << result << std::endl;
        return -1;
    }

    Message msg;
    int ctr = 0;
    // consume 100 messages
    while (ctr < 100) {
        consumer.receive(msg);
        std::cout << "Received: " << msg
            << "  with payload '" << msg.getDataAsString() << "'" << std::endl;

        consumer.acknowledge(msg);
        ctr++;
    }

    std::cout << "Finished consuming synchronously!" << std::endl;

    client.close();
    return 0;
}

Consumer with a message listener​

You can avoid running a loop with blocking calls with an event based style by using a message listener which is invoked for each message that is received.

This example starts a subscription at the earliest offset and consumes 100 messages.


#include <pulsar/Client.h>
#include <atomic>
#include <thread>

using namespace pulsar;

std::atomic<uint32_t> messagesReceived;

void handleAckComplete(Result res) {
    std::cout << "Ack res: " << res << std::endl;
}

void listener(Consumer consumer, const Message& msg) {
    std::cout << "Got message " << msg << " with content '" << msg.getDataAsString() << "'" << std::endl;
    messagesReceived++;
    consumer.acknowledgeAsync(msg.getMessageId(), handleAckComplete);
}

int main() {
    Client client("pulsar://localhost:6650");

    Consumer consumer;
    ConsumerConfiguration config;
    config.setMessageListener(listener);
    config.setSubscriptionInitialPosition(InitialPositionEarliest);
    Result result = client.subscribe("persistent://public/default/my-topic", "consumer-1", config, consumer);
    if (result != ResultOk) {
        std::cout << "Failed to subscribe: " << result << std::endl;
        return -1;
    }

    // wait for 100 messages to be consumed
    while (messagesReceived < 100) {
        std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(100));
    }

    std::cout << "Finished consuming asynchronously!" << std::endl;

    client.close();
    return 0;
}

Create a producer​

To use Pulsar as a producer, you need to create a producer on the C++ client. There are two main ways of using a producer:

Simple blocking example​

This example sends 100 messages using the blocking style. While simple, it does not produce high throughput as it waits for each ack to come back before sending the next message.


#include <pulsar/Client.h>
#include <thread>

using namespace pulsar;

int main() {
    Client client("pulsar://localhost:6650");

    Result result = client.createProducer("persistent://public/default/my-topic", producer);
    if (result != ResultOk) {
        std::cout << "Error creating producer: " << result << std::endl;
        return -1;
    }

    // Send 100 messages synchronously
    int ctr = 0;
    while (ctr < 100) {
        std::string content = "msg" + std::to_string(ctr);
        Message msg = MessageBuilder().setContent(content).setProperty("x", "1").build();
        Result result = producer.send(msg);
        if (result != ResultOk) {
            std::cout << "The message " << content << " could not be sent, received code: " << result << std::endl;
        } else {
            std::cout << "The message " << content << " sent successfully" << std::endl;
        }

        std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(100));
        ctr++;
    }

    std::cout << "Finished producing synchronously!" << std::endl;

    client.close();
    return 0;
}

Non-blocking example​

This example sends 100 messages using the non-blocking style calling sendAsync instead of send. This allows the producer to have multiple messages inflight at a time which increases throughput.

The producer configuration blockIfQueueFull is useful here to avoid ResultProducerQueueIsFull errors when the internal queue for outgoing send requests becomes full. Once the internal queue is full, sendAsync becomes blocking which can make your code simpler.

Without this configuration, the result code ResultProducerQueueIsFull is passed to the callback. You must decide how to deal with that (retry, discard etc).


#include <pulsar/Client.h>
#include <thread>

using namespace pulsar;

std::atomic<uint32_t> acksReceived;

void callback(Result code, const MessageId& msgId, std::string msgContent) {
    // message processing logic here
    std::cout << "Received ack for msg: " << msgContent << " with code: "
        << code << " -- MsgID: " << msgId << std::endl;
    acksReceived++;
}

int main() {
    Client client("pulsar://localhost:6650");

    ProducerConfiguration producerConf;
    producerConf.setBlockIfQueueFull(true);
    Producer producer;
    Result result = client.createProducer("persistent://public/default/my-topic",
                                          producerConf, producer);
    if (result != ResultOk) {
        std::cout << "Error creating producer: " << result << std::endl;
        return -1;
    }

    // Send 100 messages asynchronously
    int ctr = 0;
    while (ctr < 100) {
        std::string content = "msg" + std::to_string(ctr);
        Message msg = MessageBuilder().setContent(content).setProperty("x", "1").build();
        producer.sendAsync(msg, std::bind(callback,
                                          std::placeholders::_1, std::placeholders::_2, content));

        std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(100));
        ctr++;
    }

    // wait for 100 messages to be acked
    while (acksReceived < 100) {
        std::this_thread::sleep_for(std::chrono::milliseconds(100));
    }

    std::cout << "Finished producing asynchronously!" << std::endl;

    client.close();
    return 0;
}

Partitioned topics and lazy producers​

When scaling out a Pulsar topic, you may configure a topic to have hundreds of partitions. Likewise, you may have also scaled out your producers so there are hundreds or even thousands of producers. This can put some strain on the Pulsar brokers as when you create a producer on a partitioned topic, internally it creates one internal producer per partition which involves communications to the brokers for each one. So for a topic with 1000 partitions and 1000 producers, it ends up creating 1,000,000 internal producers across the producer applications, each of which has to communicate with a broker to find out which broker it should connect to and then perform the connection handshake.

You can reduce the load caused by this combination of a large number of partitions and many producers by doing the following:

  • use SinglePartition partition routing mode (this ensures that all messages are only sent to a single, randomly selected partition)
  • use non-keyed messages (when messages are keyed, routing is based on the hash of the key and so messages will end up being sent to multiple partitions)
  • use lazy producers (this ensures that an internal producer is only created on demand when a message needs to be routed to a partition)

With our example above, that reduces the number of internal producers spread out over the 1000 producer apps from 1,000,000 to just 1000.

Note that there can be extra latency for the first message sent. If you set a low send timeout, this timeout could be reached if the initial connection handshake is slow to complete.


ProducerConfiguration producerConf;
producerConf.setPartitionsRoutingMode(ProducerConfiguration::UseSinglePartition);
producerConf.setLazyStartPartitionedProducers(true);

Enable authentication in connection URLs​

If you use TLS authentication when connecting to Pulsar, you need to add ssl in the connection URLs, and the default port is 6651. The following is an example.


ClientConfiguration config = ClientConfiguration();
config.setUseTls(true);
config.setTlsTrustCertsFilePath("/path/to/cacert.pem");
config.setTlsAllowInsecureConnection(false);
config.setAuth(pulsar::AuthTls::create(
            "/path/to/client-cert.pem", "/path/to/client-key.pem"););

Client client("pulsar+ssl://my-broker.com:6651", config);

For complete examples, refer to C++ client examples.

Schema​

This section describes some examples of schema. For more information about schema, see Pulsar schema.

Avro schema​

  • The following example shows how to create a producer with an Avro schema.


    static const std::string exampleSchema =
        "{\"type\":\"record\",\"name\":\"Example\",\"namespace\":\"test\","
        "\"fields\":[{\"name\":\"a\",\"type\":\"int\"},{\"name\":\"b\",\"type\":\"int\"}]}";
    Producer producer;
    ProducerConfiguration producerConf;
    producerConf.setSchema(SchemaInfo(AVRO, "Avro", exampleSchema));
    client.createProducer("topic-avro", producerConf, producer);

  • The following example shows how to create a consumer with an Avro schema.


    static const std::string exampleSchema =
        "{\"type\":\"record\",\"name\":\"Example\",\"namespace\":\"test\","
        "\"fields\":[{\"name\":\"a\",\"type\":\"int\"},{\"name\":\"b\",\"type\":\"int\"}]}";
    ConsumerConfiguration consumerConf;
    Consumer consumer;
    consumerConf.setSchema(SchemaInfo(AVRO, "Avro", exampleSchema));
    client.subscribe("topic-avro", "sub-2", consumerConf, consumer)

ProtobufNative schema​

The following example shows how to create a producer and a consumer with a ProtobufNative schema. ​

  1. Generate the User class using Protobuf3.

    note

    You need to use Protobuf3 or later versions.

​


syntax = "proto3";

message User {
    string name = 1;
    int32 age = 2;
}

​ 2. Include the ProtobufNativeSchema.h in your source code. Ensure the Protobuf dependency has been added to your project. ​


#include <pulsar/ProtobufNativeSchema.h>

​ 3. Create a producer to send a User instance. ​


ProducerConfiguration producerConf;
producerConf.setSchema(createProtobufNativeSchema(User::GetDescriptor()));
Producer producer;
client.createProducer("topic-protobuf", producerConf, producer);
User user;
user.set_name("my-name");
user.set_age(10);
std::string content;
user.SerializeToString(&content);
producer.send(MessageBuilder().setContent(content).build());

​ 4. Create a consumer to receive a User instance. ​


ConsumerConfiguration consumerConf;
consumerConf.setSchema(createProtobufNativeSchema(User::GetDescriptor()));
consumerConf.setSubscriptionInitialPosition(InitialPositionEarliest);
Consumer consumer;
client.subscribe("topic-protobuf", "my-sub", consumerConf, consumer);
Message msg;
consumer.receive(msg);
User user2;
user2.ParseFromArray(msg.getData(), msg.getLength());

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