Can I recursively create a path in Zookeeper?

Question

I'm pulling ZooKeeper into a project for some concurrency management, and the first thing I tried was something that, to me, was quite obvious (using the zkpython binding):

zh = zookeeper.init('localhost:2181')
zookeeper.create(zh, '/path/to/a/node', '', [ZOO_OPEN_ACL_UNSAFE])

And I got back a NoNodeException for my trouble.

After reflecting on this and reviewing the docs (such as they are), I've been unable to find a way to do the equivalent of a mkdir -p where ZooKeeper will create the missing parent nodes for me.

Am I missing anything, or am I just stuck issuing separate create()s for each part of a path whether I like it or not?

Answer 1

You're stuck to issue separate create()s for each element of the path. Zookeeper has only atomic operations build in. Creating a path recursively is not an atomic operation anymore. Zookeeper could not know, what you want it to do, if the operation hangs after creating half of the path elements. I don't know, if there's already a Zookeeper helper library in python. There is one in java (zkClient) that will let you create recursive paths by calling create() multiple times.