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.

To build Forrest, type 'build' on Windows, or './build.sh' on Unix. If everything is successful, you should see a message like this:

  *-----------------------------------------------------------------
  | installation notice
  *-----------------------------------------------------------------
  | You have built the distribution of Forrest.
  | Please set the environment variable FORREST_HOME point to src/core
  | 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:

~/apache/forrest$ export FORREST_HOME=`pwd`/src/core
~/apache/forrest$ export PATH=$PATH:$FORREST_HOME/bin
     

After updating the Forrest source from SVN if there have been certain types of updates (to the Java source for xml-forrest.jar), you will have to build forrest again.

Forrest is now ready to go. Type 'forrest run' to see the local webapp using the bundled Jetty server. Edit some of Forrest's core documentation and see the effect. The document Using Forrest is your next step.