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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

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)

Installing IOT utilities

From EdgeX version 3.0, the C utilities used by the SDK must be installed as a pre-requisite package, rather than being downloaded and built with the SDK itself as in previous versions. Note that if re-using an old build tree, the src/c/iot and include/iot directories must be removed as these will be outdated.

All commands shown are to be run as the root user.

Debian and Ubuntu

Management of package signing keys is changed in newer versions. For Debian 11 and Ubuntu 22.04:

apt-get install lsb-release apt-transport-https curl gnupg
curl -fsSL https://iotech.jfrog.io/artifactory/api/gpg/key/public | gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/iotech.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/iotech.gpg] https://iotech.jfrog.io/iotech/debian-release $(lsb_release -cs) main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/iotech.list
apt-get update
apt-get install iotech-iot-1.5-dev

For earlier versions:

apt-get install lsb-release apt-transport-https curl gnupg
curl -fsSL https://iotech.jfrog.io/artifactory/api/gpg/key/public | apt-key add -
echo "deb https://iotech.jfrog.io/iotech/debian-release $(lsb_release -cs) main" | tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/iotech.list
apt-get update
apt-get install iotech-iot-1.5-dev

Alpine

wget https://iotech.jfrog.io/artifactory/api/security/keypair/public/repositories/alpine-release -O /etc/apk/keys/alpine.dev.rsa.pub
echo "https://iotech.jfrog.io/artifactory/alpine-release/v3.16/main" >> /etc/apk/repositories
apk update
apk add iotech-iot-1.5-dev

Note: If not using Alpine 3.16, replace v3.16 in the above commands with the correct version.

Next Steps

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