You can read Build instructions for Hadoop. http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/hadoop/common/trunk/BUILDING.txt
For your problem, proto-buf not set in PATH. After setting, recheck proto-buffer version is 2.5 From: nagarjuna kanamarlapudi [mailto:nagarjuna.kanamarlap...@gmail.com] Sent: 07 January 2014 09:18 To: user@hadoop.apache.org Subject: unable to compile hadoop source code Hi, I checked out the source code from https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/hadoop/common/trunk/ I tried to compile the code with mvn. I am compiling this on a mac os X , mavericks. Any help is appreciated. It failed at the following stage [INFO] Apache Hadoop Auth Examples ....................... SUCCESS [5.017s] [INFO] Apache Hadoop Common .............................. FAILURE [1:39.797s] [INFO] Apache Hadoop NFS ................................. SKIPPED [INFO] Apache Hadoop Common Project ...................... SKIPPED [INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [ERROR] Failed to execute goal org.apache.hadoop:hadoop-maven-plugins:3.0.0-SNAPSHOT:protoc (compile-protoc) on project hadoop-common: org.apache.maven.plugin.MojoExecutionException: 'protoc --version' did not return a version -> [Help 1] [ERROR] [ERROR] To see the full stack trace of the errors, re-run Maven with the -e switch. [ERROR] Re-run Maven using the -X switch to enable full debug logging. Thanks, Nagarjuna K