HomeDocumentation > Developer's guide > Apache Geronimo Development Tools Project > How to Build Geronimo Eclipse Plugin from Source

To build the Geronimo Eclipse Plugin (GEP) from source you need to have the following prerequisites installed.

  1. Create a directory gep in the root location.

    Useful Information

    It is strongly recommended that you use a small directory name for the source code download. At times there have been issues due to long path.

  2. Open a command prompt and change gep directory created before. Run the following command to start downloading the source.
    svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/geronimo/devtools/eclipse-plugin/trunk trunk
    



  3. Subversion will start downloading the source and the command window will show the progress information.





  4. On successful download you can see the revision number for the downloaded source.





Building Source

  1. Modify heap settings for JVM as follows.

    The following environment variable needs be set to properly configure the JVM to meet memory requirements.
    MAVEN_OPTS="-Xms512m -Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m"

    On Windows use the following command to set the environment variable (note that double quotes should not be used):
    set MAVEN_OPTS=-Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m

  2. Change to the trunk directory of the source you have downloaded and run the following command
    mvn clean install -Ptestsuite
    



  3. Once done various dependencies will be downloaded to your m2 repository. If you are building GEP for the first time it may take considerable time.



  4. On the success of build you can see a Build Successful message on the command prompt.





    You do not need to manually download Eclipse or the web tools project to build. This is taken care of for you automatically during the build process. You can find the downloads at
    <Local_M2_Repo>\eclipse-downloads

    Other Maven options

    Skip Test

    At times your build may fail due to test case failure. You can skip the test by running the following command
    mvn clean -Dmaven.test.skip=true -Dmaven.itest.skip=true install
    

    Skipping tests is not recommended