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Building

To buildnuts Package Management you need the following software installed on your machine:

  • java JDK 8 (nuts is still compatible with java 8)
  • maven 3.8+
  • You favorite IDE (I'm using Netbeans and sometimes IntellijIdea and very sporadically Eclipse)

Compiling Nuts​

Here is the typical commands to get your own local copy of nuts sources and to compile them.

First of all, get your local copy of nuts source code from github

git clone https://github.com/thevpc/nuts.git
cd nuts

Then, you need to invoke mvn install to compile all of the project:

mvn clean install

That being done, nuts will be compiled and installed to your local maven repository.

Building Documentation and preparing development scripts​

The next thing we need to worry about is the building of nuts community website and to have a working development version of nuts you can rely on in your tests manipulations.

To do so we will need to install locally nuts and nsh.

Assuming you are always under nuts repo root folder, issue the following command (its a bash command, so you need to be on linux or MacOS for it to work)

cd installers/nuts-release-tool
java -jar target/nuts-release-tool-$version.jar

You can now play with your development version of nuts using the generated nuts-dev script. You may want to update the following line to match your java 8 JDK install location or simply add it to your shell rcfile.

NUTS_JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib64/jvm/java-1.8.0-openjdk-1.8.0

Indeed, you must compile nuts with java 8 because nuts needs to be working on Java 8 and all later java versions ( this means that compiling on more recent versions of java should pass successfully as well). So you must not use deprecated features (in java9+) in nuts source code (examples : js nashorn, rmi activation, etc...)

Running, testing and working with nuts-dev, in development environment​

Here are some tips when working on nuts project or even working on an application that builds on nuts using NAF (aka Nuts Application Framework) for example:

  • nuts-dev is the script you are most of the time using when developing nuts project.

  • nuts-dev script uses a special workspace called development, so it does not interfere with your local nuts installation.

  • you can always change the workspace in nuts-dev using -w option

./nuts-dev -w test
  • You can run nuts in debug mode with --debug that shall be the very FIRST option. The following example will spawn a jvm listening on the 5005/tcp port you can attach to your favorite IDE.
./nuts-dev --debug
  • Always make sure you are working on a clean workspace, to have a reproducible environment,
./nuts-dev -Zy

  • If you are willing to run directly from your IDE, make sure you add -w=development or -w=test to the program command line arguments as an example to work on a separate workspace than the one used in production or locally

  • If you want to debug an application running under nuts, you can just debug nuts project using the embedded flag ( -b or --embedded) to run that application in the same virtual machine

nuts -w test -b my-app
  • If you want to debug an application running under nuts in a separate virtual machine, use the option --debug option to run the application in debug mode listening to the 5005 tcp port, then attach it to your IDE. This will debug nuts itself but will make possible running spawn jvm as well, the effective debugging port will be randomly selected and displayed on your stdout. You will need to attach another jvm to your IDE using that port.
nuts -w test --debug my-app
# or
nuts -w test --debug=5010 my-app
  • When you need to have more information about what nuts is doing under the hood, just run it in verbose mode
./nuts-dev --verbose install some-application
  • You may want to disable creation of shortcuts and desktop icons in development mode:
./nuts-dev --!init-launchers
  • You may want to disable all repositories and use solely your local maven repo:
./nuts-dev -r=maven-local