sdbusplus contains two parts:
- A C++ library (libsdbusplus) for interacting with D-Bus, built on top of the sd-bus library from systemd.
- A tool (sdbus++) to generate C++ bindings to simplify the development of D-Bus-based applications.
The sdbusplus library requires sd-bus, which is contained in libsystemd.
The sdbus++ application requires Python 3 and the Python libraries mako and inflection.
The sdbusplus library builds on top of the sd-bus library to create a modern C++ API for D-Bus. The library attempts to be as lightweight as possible, usually compiling to exactly the sd-bus API calls that would have been necessary, while also providing compile-time type-safety and memory leak protection afforded by modern C++ practices.
Consider the following code:
auto b = bus::new_default_system();
auto m = b.new_method_call("org.freedesktop.login1",
"/org/freedesktop/login1",
"org.freedesktop.login1.Manager",
"ListUsers");
auto reply = b.call(m);
std::vector<std::tuple<uint32_t, std::string, message::object_path>> users;
reply.read(users);
In a few, relatively succinct, C++ lines this snippet will create a D-Bus connection to the system bus, and call the systemd login manager to get a list of active users. The message and bus objects are automatically freed when they leave scope and the message format strings are generated at compile time based on the types being read. Compare this to the corresponding server code within logind.
In general, the library attempts to mimic the naming conventions of the sd-bus
library: ex. sd_bus_call becomes sdbusplus::bus::call,
sd_bus_get_unique_name becomes sdbusplus::bus::get_unique_name,
sd_bus_message_get_signature becomes sdbusplus::message::get_signature,
etc. This allows a relatively straight-forward translation back to the sd-bus
functions for looking up the manpage details.
sdbusplus also contains a bindings generator tool: sdbus++. The purpose of
a bindings generator is to reduce the boilerplate associated with creating
D-Bus server or client applications. When creating a server application,
rather than creating sd-bus vtables and writing C-style functions to handle
each vtable callback, you can create a small YAML file to define your D-Bus
interface and the sdbus++ tool will create a C++ class that implements your
D-Bus interface. This class has a set of virtual functions for each method
and property, which you can overload to create your own customized behavior
for the interface.
There are currently two types of YAML files: interface and error. Interfaces are used to create server and client D-Bus interfaces. Errors are used to define C++ exceptions which can be thrown and will automatically turn into D-Bus error responses.
[[ D-Bus client bindings are not yet implemented. See openbmc/openbmc#851. ]]
The path of your file will be the interface name. For example, for an interface
org.freedesktop.Example, you would create the files
org/freedesktop/Example.interface.yaml and
org/freedesktop/Example.errors.yaml] for interfaces and errors respectively.
These can then be used to generate the server and error bindings:
sdbus++ interface server-header org.freedesktop.Example > \
org/freedesktop/Example/server.hpp
sdbus++ interface server-cpp org.freedesktop.Example > \
org/freedesktop/Example/server.cpp
sdbus++ error exception-header org.freedesktop.Example > \
org/freedesktop/Example/error.hpp \
sdbus++ error exception-cpp org.freedesktop.Example > \
org/freedesktop/Example/error.cpp
Markdown-based documentation can also be generated from the interface and exception files:
sdbus++ interface markdown org.freedesktop.Example > \
org/freedesktop/Example.md
sdbus++ error markdown org.freedesktop.Example >> \
org/freedesktop/Example.md
See the example/Makefile.am for more details.
Installation of sdbusplus bindings on a custom distribution requires a few packages to be installed prior. Although these packages are the same for several distributions the names of these packages do differ. Below are the packages needed for Ubuntu and Fedora.
sudo apt install git autoconf libtool pkg-config g++ autoconf-archive libsystemd-dev python3 python3-pip python3-yaml python3-mako python3-inflection
sudo dnf install git autoconf libtool gcc-c++ pkgconfig autoconf-archive systemd-devel python3 python3-pip python3-yaml python3-mako
Install the inflection package using the pip utility (on Fedora)
pip3 install inflection