Building Weasis

These instructions describe how to build Weasis directly from the Git repository on any platform. For building Weasis from an IDE, see Weasis plug-in development guidelines.

Prerequisites

  1. JDK 11 or higher
  2. Maven 3.5.3 or higher
    If your computer is behind a proxy server, configure maven.
  3. Git or directly download source from github

Getting the Source

To clone the repository, first install GIT and either clone using a graphical GIT client or directly from the command line using the command:

$ git clone https://github.com/nroduit/Weasis.git

The trunk is not a stable version and snapshot version is not retained in the cache for the web distribution (it means the files will be downloaded every time)

Check out a tag version to build a stable version, see the tag list.

$ git checkout <TAG_NAME>

Building all Plug-ins

  • Go in the Weasis directory, compile and install all the plug-ins in the local Maven repository 
    $ mvn clean install

Building Weasis Distributions

The native installer will progressively replace the portable and the web distribution. It uses the weasis protocol (which not requires jar signing) instead of Java Web Start which has been removed from Java 11 release and because the end of public Oracle Java 8 updates from April 2019.
The documentation for building the native installer we be available from Weasis 4.

  • Requires installing all the plug-ins in the local Maven repository as described in the item above. 
    $ cd weasis-distributions
$ mvn clean package -Dportable=true -P compressXZ

    -P compressXZ: Option for compressing the packages in xz, only from Weasis 3.6.0. The compression pack200 is not supported anymore (removed from Java 14), before 3.6.0 the profile was -P pack200.
    -Dportable=true: Option for building the portable distribution (multi-platform standalone launchers)

    For the WEB distribution using Java Webstart, it is required to sign jar files with your own certificate (by replacing values in the command below with your own values). A trust-worthy certificate from a certificate authority is required to run Java Web Start applications. A self-signed certificate generate by keytool will always display a security warning message.

    The parameters must be placed in the maven user setting or has to be the options in the Maven command: 
    $ mvn clean package -Djarsigner.alias="your_alias" -Djarsigner.storepass="your_pwd" -Djarsigner.keystore="your_path/keystore" -Dportable=true -P compressXZ

    For production, version must not end with SNAPSHOT (otherwise packages will not be kept in cache). So to remove SNAPASHOT or to make your own release (for avoiding package mix-up in cache), modify the changelist property. From the Weasis root folder, execute:

    $ mvn clean install -Dchangelist=-mybuild
$ mvn clean package -Dchangelist=-mybuild -Dportable=true -P compressXZ -f weasis-distributions

  • Options for building the portable distribution.

    • By default, the executable on Windows runs only a single instance (from Weasis 2.0). To disable single instance in the portable version, set windowsName property empty. 
      $ mvn clean package -Dportable=true -DwindowsName=
    • On 64-bit system, it requires installing the 32-bit compatibility libraries to build the windows executable. On Linux, you need to install ia32-libs package.

      Do not place the sources in a path that contains directories with blanks or national characters, the compilation of the win32 executable can fail.

  • The distribution files are located in:

    • target/web-dist/
    • target/portable-dist/