In this post I’ll outline how to setup and connect a thrift client in PHP. If you’d like to learn how to setup and run a thrift server please see my friend Mike Cvet’s post here on setting up a C++ thrift server.

You’re in a meeting and some Sr. Dev from the systems or backend team says: “Great! just connect to my service via thrift, we already handle all the db connections and most of the caching. You guys use Ruby right? oh..  PHP? that’s cool too, sweet! *looks over to the PM* We should be done in a week…”. Oh snap! A week? What is this thrift thing? And what is this Ruby thing all those young whipper snappers keep talking about!?”. (Yes this is the use case I wish to satisfy with my post)

Apache Thrift is a great RPC framework originally developed and released by Facebook (added to the Apache incubator back in 2008).  I’ve used thrift for the last few years as a simple / efficient way to exchange data across machines, applications, and languages.  A coworker and I thought it’d be cool to do another Thrift tutorial, because at the time of this post, the official tutorials are being developed.  Following the nature of thrift, we also thought it’d be cool (we are nerds) to split the tutorial across 2 different blogs, I will explain the client, he will explain the server.   As a quick warning, this tutorial is rather verbose, I like hearing myself talk… Feel free to skim through the code if you want to skip my life story.  Warning #2, I wrote this tutorial after drinking an entire bottle of wine, you have been warned.

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