I've been fascinated by the concepts in finagle for some time, but being a scala noob, I never knew how to bootstrap a finagle project. Turns out twitter has a gem, scala-bootstrapper, that generates a simple thirft based key/value store for you. There's even a tutorial on how to extend the example project into a distributed search service.

This is a guide on setting it all up locally, it assumes you have Git, Homebrew, and OS X.

1) Install scala 2.8.1

2) Install sbt 0.7.4 (assumes you have a ~/bin in your $PATH)

3) Install scala-bootstrapper

4) Generate finagle project

5) Add a Client class

create newbird/src/main/scala/com/twitter/newbird/Client.scala with

6) Running the server

7) Playing with the client

Bonus

finagle exports a stats url you can curl: