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, 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.