Other OS support

Not every OS has an official Java protocol buffers compiler (protoc) binary deployed to Maven Central. This plugin does however support detecting some of these OSes. For these OSes it still tries to download the protoc compiler the same way it would do for a supported OS. It is up to you to deploy the protoc binary for this unsupported OS to your local Maven repository.

This is a list of OSes currently supported by this plugin which, do not have an official protoc binary deployed in Maven Central:

illumos / Solaris

Building protoc for illumos / Solaris

Building the protoc binary for illumos and Solaris requires access to a machine or VM running illumos or Solaris. The following steps show how to build the protoc binary version 35.1 and how to deploy it to your own local Maven repository in such a way this plugin can automatically use it. This example uses a SmartOS (illumos) native zone with pkgsrc, but the instructions should be similar for other illumos distributions or Solaris.

Install the required tooling for building protoc:

$ pkgin install git cmake gmake gcc13 openjdk21

Prepare the source tree for building version 35.1:

$ git clone https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf.git
$ cd protobuf/
$ git checkout v35.1
$ git submodule update --init --recursive

Build the Protobuf compiler:

$ rm -rf build CMakeCache.txt CMakeFiles
$ cmake . -DCMAKE_CXX_STANDARD=17 \
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/opt/local \
-Dprotobuf_BUILD_TESTS=OFF \
-Dprotobuf_BUILD_LIBPROTOC=ON \
-Dprotobuf_BUILD_PROTOC_BINARIES=ON \
-Dprotobuf_BUILD_PROTOBUF_BINARIES=ON \
-Dprotobuf_FORCE_FETCH_DEPENDENCIES=ON
$ cmake --build . -j4

Remove the debug symbols (using strip) from the resulting executable and correct its name:

$ strip ./protoc
$ mv ./protoc ~/protoc-4.35.1-sunos-x86_64.exe

You can now deploy the protoc-4.35.1-sunos-x86_64.exe (protoc) binary to your local Maven repository.

Deploying a protoc binary to a repository

Once you have build a protoc binary for an unsupported platform, you can deploy the binary to your Maven repository. This example shows how to deploy a protoc binary built for illumos to a local Maven repository in such a way that this plugin will automatically find it:

$ mvn deploy:deploy-file \
-DrepositoryId=third-party \
-Durl=https://reposilite.example.com/third-party/ \
-Dfile="protoc-4.35.1-sunos-x86_64.exe" \
-DgroupId="com.google.protobuf" \
-DartifactId="protoc" \
-Dversion="4.35.1" \
-Dpackaging=exe \
-Dclassifier="sunos-x86_64" \
-DcreateChecksum=true