The HBase native client build using cmake and produces a linux library.
The easiest way to build hbase-native-client is to use Docker. This will mean that any platform with docker can be used to build the hbase-native-client. It will also mean that you're building with the same versions of all dependencies that the client is tested with.
On OSX the current boot2docker solution will work however it's pretty slow. If things get too slow using dinghy can help speed things up by using nfs.
If possible pairing virtual box with dinghy will result in the fastest, most stable docker environment.
However none of them is a must.
Go into the hbase-native-client directory and run ./bin/start-docker.sh that will build the docker development environment and when complete will drop you into a shell on a linux vm with all the dependencies needed installed.
To start with make sure that you have built the java project using mvn package -DskipTests. That will allow all tests to spin up a standalone hbase instance from the jar's created.
Note: you can run the HBase Maven build outside of docker but the cached classpath used by the unit tests may not reflect the paths from within the docker container.
cmake . make make install
To run the tests, you can use make test or run each compiled test individually as they are built in the top level directory of the module. For example from the hbase-native-client directory you can execute ./client-test.