Title:     Building PDFBox

# Building from Source

Building PDFBox from source is only necessary if you're wanting to contribute code to the PDFBox project. Most users should use the [binary releases](../downloads.html) instead.

## Obtaining the Source

You can obtain the latest source of PDFBox from our [SVN repo](../downloads.html) The current trunk is v2.0.0-SNAPSHOT. There is a seperate branch for the 1.8.x series. You can fetch the latest 2.0 trunk using Subversion:

    svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/pdfbox/trunk/
    cd trunk

## Build dependencies

### PDFBox 1.8

- JDK 5 or 6
-  [Maven 2](http://maven.apache.org/)

### PDFBox 2.0

- JDK 6+
- Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) [see below]
-  [Maven 2](http://maven.apache.org/)

### Java Cryptography Extension (JCE)

Building PDFBox 2.0 requires a JDK with "unlimited strength" cryptography, which requires extra files to be installed. For JDK 7, see [Java Cryptography Extension (JCE)](http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jce-7-download-432124.html). If these files are not installed, building PDFBox will fail the following test:

    TestPublicKeyEncryption.setUp:70 JCE unlimited strength jurisdiction policy files are not installed
    
## Building with Maven

In the root directory of PDFBox:

    mvn clean install

---

## Building with Ant (Deprecated, removed in 2.0.0)

The old Ant build is still available, and can be used especially for
building .NET binaries with IKVM:

1.  Install [ANT](http://ant.apache.org/). PDFBox currently uses 1.6.2
    but other versions probably work as well.
2.  (optional) Setup IKVM, if you want to build the .NET DLL version of
    PDFBox.
    1.  [IKVM](http://www.ikvm.net/) binaries
    2.  In the build.properties, set the ikvm.dir property:\
         `ikvm.dir=C:\\javalib\\ikvm-12-07-2004\\ikvm`

3.  Run "`ant`" from the root PDFBox directory. This will create the
    .zip package distribution. See the build file for other ant targets.

NOTE: If you want to run PDFBox from an IDE them you will need to add
the 'Resources' directory to the project classpath in your IDE.

### Dependencies for Ant Builds

The above instructions expect that you're using [Maven](http://maven.apache.org/) or another build tool like [Ivy](http://ant.apache.org/ivy/) that supports Maven dependencies.
If you instead use tools like [Ant](http://ant.apache.org/) where you need to explicitly include all the required library jars in your application, you'll need to do
something different.

The easiest approach is to run ``mvn dependency:copy-dependencies`` inside the pdfbox directory of the latest PDFBox source release. This will copy all the required and optional
libraries discussed above into the pdfbox/target/dependencies directory. You can then simply copy all the libraries you need from this directory to your application.