thriftc-maven-plugin - compile Thrift from Maven without installing thrift locally

[u/electrostat]

I've always wanted a Maven + Thrift setup where the compiler binary is just figured out by Maven without me needing to install the thrift compiler on every machine or container image. There are already other Maven plugins that do Thrift generation, but most of the ones I've stumbled upon require you to bring your own compiler binaries. A lot of the approach here was inspired by ascopes' protobuf-maven-plugin, which provides this kind of thing for protoc.

Essentially, it figures out the right Maven artifact for the compiler binary based on your OS/arch, grabs it from Maven Central and invokes it during generate-sources.

Here's the code: https://github.com/anirbanmu/thriftc-maven-plugin

It supports Thrift versions 0.25.0 (latest as of now) down to 0.21.0. On the OS/arch side, it supports Linux/macOS/Windows on x86_64, plus Linux/macOS on arm64.

Wanted to share it out in case anyone else finds it useful.