Building Forrest

Step-by-step Subversion (SVN) instructions

1. Make sure you have a recent release of a Subversion client installed and properly configured.
2. Read the ASF notes about source repositories and version control.
3. At a command prompt, enter 'svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/forrest/trunk forrest' (committers should replace http with https).
4. This will create a directory called "forrest" where the Forrest source will be stored.

Whenever you want to update your Forrest source tree to the current version, change to the top-level "forrest" directory and invoke 'svn update'.

To see what changes you've made, invoke 'svn status'

SVN is really powerful. See Version Control with Subversion - the opensource SVN book.

Using source snapshots

It is preferable to use SVN, but if you cannot for some reason, then source snapshots are available (automatically packed every six hours).

To build Forrest, change directory to 'forrest/main', and then type 'build' on Windows or './build.sh' on Unix. (Requires Java 1.4) If everything is successful, you should see a message similar to:

  *-----------------------------------------------------------------
  | Installation notice
  *-----------------------------------------------------------------
  | You have built the X.Y-dev version of Forrest.
  | Please set the environment variable FORREST_HOME point to
  |  /svn/forrest
  | It is recommended to add
  |    unix: $FORREST_HOME/bin: to your $PATH
  |    win: %FORREST_HOME%\bin; to your %PATH%
  | Then do 'forrest -projecthelp' to list options for the 'forrest' command
  | More help at http://forrest.apache.org/
  *-----------------------------------------------------------------
     

As the message says, you need to add the distribution's bin/ ("binary") directory to your PATH variable, so the 'forrest' command is available everywhere:

[~]$ cd /path/to/svn/forrest
[/svn/forrest]$ export FORREST_HOME=`pwd`
[/svn/forrest]$ export PATH=$PATH:$FORREST_HOME/bin
     

Forrest is now ready to go. To view and edit the local copy of Forrest core documentation, cd to site-author and do 'forrest run' to see the local webapp using the bundled Jetty server. Edit something in content/xdocs/*.xml see the immediate effect.

The document Using Forrest is your next step.