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Getting Started - C Developers

Introduction image

These instructions are for C Developers and Contributors to get, run and otherwise work with C-based EdgeX Foundry micro services. Before reading this guide, review the general developer requirements.

If you want to get the EdgeX platform and run it (but do not intend to change or add to the existing code base now) then you are considered a "User". Users should read: Getting Started as a User)

What You Need For C Development

Many of EdgeX device services are built in C. In the future, other services could be built in C. In additional to the hardware and software listed in the Developers guide, to build EdgeX C services, you will need the following:

  • libmicrohttpd
  • libcurl
  • libyaml
  • libcbor
  • paho
  • libuuid
  • hiredis

You can install these on Debian 11 (Bullseye) by running: 

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev libmicrohttpd-dev libyaml-dev libcbor-dev libpaho-mqtt-dev uuid-dev libhiredis-dev
Some of these supporting packages have dependencies of their own, which will be automatically installed when using package managers such as APT, DNF etc.

libpaho-mqtt-dev is not included in Ubuntu prior to Groovy (20.10). IOTech provides a package for Focal (20.04 LTS) which may be installed as follows:

sudo curl -fsSL https://iotech.jfrog.io/artifactory/api/gpg/key/public -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/iotech-public.asc
sudo echo "deb https://iotech.jfrog.io/iotech/debian-release $(lsb_release -cs) main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/iotech.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libpaho-mqtt

EdgeX 2.0

For EdgeX 2.0 the C SDK now supports MQTT and Redis implementations of the EdgeX MessageBus

CMake is required to build the SDKs. Version 3 or better is required. You can install CMake on Debian by running: 

sudo apt-get install cmake

Check that your C development environment includes the following:

  • a version of GCC supporting C11
  • CMake version 3 or greater
  • Development libraries and headers for:
    • curl (version 7.56 or later)
    • microhttpd (version 0.9)
    • libyaml (version 0.1.6 or later)
    • libcbor (version 0.5)
    • libuuid (from util-linux v2.x)
    • paho (version 1.3.x)
    • hiredis (version 0.14)

Next Steps

To explore how to create and build EdgeX device services in C, head to the Device Services, C SDK guide.