For Ubuntu 14.04 and 16.04, see bin/bootstrap_development.sh. It will alter your environment, including ~/.ssh/config and /etc/hosts, so consider running it in a VM or container. For instructions specific to Docker, see Docker for Impala Developers.
Note: The source, a full build, and creating and importing all the test data requires approximately 110G of available space. If you see an error in the console while running bootstrap_development.sh similar to "FAILED: Execution Error, return code 2 from org.apache.hadoop.hive.ql.exec.mr.MapRedTask (state=08S01,code=2)", and if you see an warning in hdfs-namenode.log similar to "
org.apache.hadoop.hdfs.server.blockmanagement.BlockPlacementPolicy: Failed to place enough replicas, still in need of 1 to reach 3", this may be an indication that you don't have enough available space.
If you encounter this error when rebuilding an existing cluster, clean up accumulated files in: ${IMPALA_HOME}/logs, ${IMPALA_HOME}/be/build. Remove older versions of cdh_components-xxxxxx in ${IMPALA_HOME}/toolchain. Use df to check disk space.