Use the Apache Thrift Proxy API

After the Thrift server is configured and running, generate Thrift bindings for the language of your choice, using an IDL file. A HBase IDL file named HBase.thrift is included as part of HBase. After generating the bindings, copy the Thrift libraries for your language into the same directory as the generated bindings. In the following Python example, these libraries provide the thrift.transport and thrift.protocol libraries. These commands show how you might generate the Thrift bindings for Python and copy the libraries on a Linux system.

mkdir HBaseThrift
cd HBaseThrift/
thrift -gen py /path/to/Hbase.thrift
mv gen-py/* .
rm -rf gen-py/
mkdir thrift
cp -rp ~/Downloads/thrift-0.9.0/lib/py/src/* ./thrift/

The following example shows a simple Python application using the Thrift Proxy API.

from thrift.transport import TSocket
from thrift.protocol import TBinaryProtocol
from thrift.transport import TTransport
from hbase import Hbase

# Connect to HBase Thrift server
transport = TTransport.TBufferedTransport(TSocket.TSocket(host, port))
protocol = TBinaryProtocol.TBinaryProtocolAccelerated(transport)

# Create and open the client connection
client = Hbase.Client(protocol)
transport.open()

# Modify a single row
mutations = [Hbase.Mutation(
  column='columnfamily:columndescriptor', value='columnvalue')]
client.mutateRow('tablename', 'rowkey', mutations)

# Modify a batch of rows
# Create a list of mutations per work of Shakespeare
mutationsbatch = []

for line in myDataFile:
    rowkey = username + "-" + filename + "-" + str(linenumber).zfill(6)

    mutations = [
            Hbase.Mutation(column=messagecolumncf, value=line.strip()),
            Hbase.Mutation(column=linenumbercolumncf, value=encode(linenumber)),
            Hbase.Mutation(column=usernamecolumncf, value=username)
        ]

       mutationsbatch.append(Hbase.BatchMutation(row=rowkey,mutations=mutations))

# Run the mutations for all the lines in myDataFile
client.mutateRows(tablename, mutationsbatch)

transport.close()