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 instead.

Obtaining the Source

You can obtain the latest source of PDFBox from our SVN repo 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

PDFBox 2.0

  • JDK 6+
  • Java Cryptography Extension (JCE) [see below]
  • Maven 2

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). 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. 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 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 or another build tool like Ivy that supports Maven dependencies. If you instead use tools like Ant 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.