Apache Commons – Building Apache Commons Components

Introduction

This document provides information on setting up and executing builds for Apache Commons components and web sites. The contents include best practices and conventions that Commons components should follow. This information should be useful to committers setting up new components as well as to volunteers who want to build Commons components or web sites from source or to contribute patches to the build artifacts.

The assumption throughout is that we are working with a component named "Apache Commons Foo" that uses Maven as its build system, both for distribution binaries and for the web site.

Some knowledge of Maven is assumed in this document. Please refer to the Maven user guide for more information. Commons components now use version 3 of Maven, so this is the Maven version assumed throughout this document.

Commons Parent POM

Commons componenents share a common parent POM. This contains common setup to reduce the setup needed in each component POM and standardizes the builds across Commons components.

Local environment setup

To build Apache Commons components or web sites, you need to have Maven installed and the project source files checked out locally.

Getting and installing Maven

Follow the Maven download instructions to download and install Maven.

Checking out the Commons sources

Follow the Commons subversion instructions to check out the Commons source files. If you want to build Commons component web sites, you need to have the commons-build module checked out as a peer to whatever component(s) you are trying to generate the site for. If you check out the full set of "trunks" using the svn externals "trunks-proper" or "trunks-sandbox" this will happen automatically.

Configuring local properties

If you regularly want to build Commons components using a different version of Java than that used to run Maven, you may wish to define the locations of the alternate JDKs in the Maven settings.xml file. See testing with different Java versions for more details. Alternatively, you can provide the location of the alternate JDK as a property on the Maven command-line, see below.

Maven Commands

Compile and test with a specific JDK

To compile and run a component's tests with JDK 1.5. This assumes that the property JAVA_1_5_HOME has been defined in the Maven settings.xml or has been defined as an OS environment variable (if both are defined, settings.xml takes precedence)

mvn clean test -Pjava-1.5

To compile (only) source and test files with Java 1.6 if settings.xml does not contain the property definitions (note this overrides any definition in settings.xml):

mvn [clean] test-compile -Pjava-1.6 -DJAVA_1_6_HOME=path-to-jdk-home

Running the Tests

To run a component's tests:

mvn test

Creating a jar file

To create a component's jar:

mvn package

Installing

To install a component in your local repository:

mvn install

Source and binary distributions

To create the source and binary distributions for a component (and the javadoc and sources jars):

mvn -Prelease package

Generating the Site

To generate a components site:

mvn site