Mesos modules provide a way to easily extend inner workings of Mesos by creating and using shared libraries that are loaded on demand. Modules can be used to customize Mesos without having to recompiling/relinking for each specific use case. Modules can isolate external dependencies into separate libraries, thus resulting into a smaller Mesos core. Modules also make it easy to experiment with new features. For example, imagine loadable allocators that contain a VM (Lua, Python, …) which makes it possible to try out new allocator algorithms written in scripting languages without forcing those dependencies into the project. Finally, modules provide an easy way for third parties to easily extend Mesos without having to know all the internal details.

For more details, please see Mesos Modules.

Building Mesos modules requires system-wide installation of the following:

1. google-protobuf
2. glog
3. boost
4. picojson

First we need to prepare Mesos source code. You can either download the Mesos standard release in the form of a tarball and extract it, or clone the git repository.

Let us assume you did extract/clone the repository into ~/mesos. Let us also assume that you build Mesos in a subdirectory called build (~/mesos/build).

Next, we need to configure and build Mesos. Due to the fact that modules will need to have access to a couple of libprocess dependencies, Mesos itself should get built with unbundled dependencies to reduce chances of problems introduced by varying versions (libmesos vs. module library).

We recommend using the following configure options:

cd <mesos-source-tree>
mkdir build
cd build
../configure --with-glog=/usr/local --with-protobuf=/usr/local --with-boost=/usr/local --prefix=$HOME/usr
make
make install

Note that the --prefix=$HOME/usr is required only if you don't want to do a system-wide Mesos installation.

Once that is done, extract/clone the mesos-modules package. For the sake of this example, that could be in ~/mesos-modules. Note that you should not put mesos-modules into the mesos folder.

You may now run start building the modules.

The configuration phase needs to know some details about your Mesos installation location, hence the following are used: --with-mesos=/path/to/mesos/installation

./bootstrap
mkdir build && cd build
../configure --with-mesos=/path/to/mesos/installation
make

At this point, the Module libraries are ready in /build/.libs.

See Mesos Modules.