Apache Forrest is an XML standards-oriented documentation framework based on Apache Cocoon, providing XSLT stylesheets and schemas, images and other resources. Forrest uses these to render the XML source content into a website via command-line, robot, or a dynamic web application.
With a downloaded distribution, Forrest is already built. Just set the environment variables for convenience: FORREST_HOME to point to src/core and add FORREST_HOME/bin to your PATH.
The source code is also provided, so you can change it and re-build by typing 'build.bat' (Windows) or './build.sh' (Unix). If you need more instructions, then see the Building Forrest document.
Forrest is ready to go! Here are some things to try ...
Simply type 'forrest' in this top-level directory. This will render the HTML and PDFs for the Forrest documentation into the build/site/ directory. Point your web browser to the index.html file.
Type 'forrest run' in this top-level directory. You can then point your browser to http://localhost:8888/ and view the Forrest website generated dynamically.
Create a new (empty) directory in your home space, cd to it, and type 'forrest seed' which will generate a skeleton directory structure and template XML. If you like, edit the XML in the src/documentation/content/xdocs/ directory. Now type 'forrest' to render your new site, or 'forrest run' to generate a webapp then experiment with editing docs in src/documentation/content/xdocs/ and watch them be instantly rendered.
Type 'forrest -projecthelp' to list the available Forrest commands. NOTE: use the 'forrest.bat' version when running under Cygwin!
For further information please read our Getting Started guide. If you have any questions or suggestions, please subscribe to the Forrest mailing lists.
Thanks for using Apache Forrest!
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