Now that we have the source the next step is to build and install the source. Since version 3.1 Drools uses to build the system. There are two profiles available which enable the associated modules "documentation" and "eclipse"; this enables quicker building of the core modules for developers. The eclipse profile will download eclipse into the drools-eclipse folder, which is over 100MB download (It depends on your operating system), however this only needs to be done once; if you wish you can move that eclipse download into another location and specify it with -DlocalEclipseDrop=/folder/jboss-rules/local-eclipse-drop-mirror. The following builds all the jars, the documentation and the eclipse zip with a local folder specified to avoid downloading eclipse:

mvn -Declipse -Ddocumentation clean install -DlocalEclipseDrop=/folder/jboss-rules/local-eclipse-drop-mirror 

You can produce distribution builds, which puts everything into zips, as follows:

mvn -Declipse -Ddocumentation clean install -DlocalEclipseDrop=/folder/jboss-rules/local-eclipse-drop-mirror
mvn -Ddocumentation -Declipse -Dmaven.test.skip package javadoc:javadoc assembly:assembly -DlocalEclipseDrop=/folder/jboss-rules/local-eclipse-drop-mirror

Note that install must be done first as javadoc:javadoc won't work unless the jars are in the local maven repo, but the tests can be skipped on the second run. assembly:assembly fails unless you increase the available memory to Maven, on windows the following command worked well: set MAVEN_OPTS=-Xmx512m

Type mvn clean to clear old artifacts, and then test and built the source, and report on any errors.

The resulting jars are put in the /target directory from the top level of the project.

As maven builds each module it will install the resulting jars in the local Maven 2 repository automatically. Where it can be easily used from other project pom.xml or copied else where.

The building of the manual is now integrated into the maven build process, and is built by either using the profile (-Ddocumentation) switch or cding into the main directory. The manual can still be built from ant command line too by cding into the documentation/manual itself.

Drools uses Docbook for this manual. Ant is used internally in maven to build documents and this build produces three different formats, all sharing the same images directory.

The manual can be generated from the project pom.xml by calling 'mvn package' in the documentation directory or adding the -Ddocumentation switch when you build the sources, with the generated documentation being copied to 'target/. What actually happens is that maven call a separate ant build.xml for the manual, located at documentation/manual; the documentation is generated into documentation/manual/build before being copied to 'target/'.

fmeyer:~/projects/jbossrules/documentation $ mvn clean package
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Drools :: Documentation
[INFO]    task-segment: [install]
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [antrun:run {execution: manual}]
[INFO] Executing tasks
 [delete] Deleting directory /Users/fernandomeyer/projects/jbossrules/documentation/manual/build

clean:

all.doc:

lang.all:

lang.misc:
   [copy] Copying 188 files to /Users/fernandomeyer/projects/jbossrules/documentation/manual/build/en/shared/images
   [copy] Copying 1 file to /Users/fernandomeyer/projects/jbossrules/documentation/manual/build/en/shared/css

lang.dochtml:
  [mkdir] Created dir: /Users/fernandomeyer/projects/jbossrules/documentation/manual/build/en/html
   [copy] Copying 1 file to /Users/fernandomeyer/projects/jbossrules/documentation/manual/build/en/html
   [java] Writing bk01-toc.html for book
   [java] Writing pr01.html for preface(preface)
   [java] Writing ch01s02.html for section
   [java] Writing ch01s03.html for section
   [java] Writing ch01s04.html for section
   [java] Writing ch01s05.html for section
   [java] Writing ch01s06.html for section
   [java] Writing ch01.html for chapter
   [java] Writing ch02s02.html for section
   [java] Writing ch02s03.html for section
   [java] Writing ch02s04.html for section
   [java] Writing ch02s05.html for section
   [java] Writing ch02.html for chapter
   [java] Writing ch03s02.html for section
   [java] Writing ch03s03.html for section
   [java] Writing ch03s04.html for section
   [java] Writing ch03s05.html for section
   [java] Writing ch03s06.html for section
   [java] Writing ch03s07.html for section
   [java] Writing ch03s08.html for section
   [java] Writing ch03s09.html for section
   [java] Writing ch03.html for chapter
   [java] Writing ch04.html for chapter
   [java] Writing ch05.html for chapter
   [java] Writing ch06s02.html for section
   [java] Writing ch06s03.html for section
   [java] Writing ch06s04.html for section
   [java] Writing ch06s05.html for section
   [java] Writing ch06.html for chapter
   [java] Writing ch07s02.html for section
   [java] Writing ch07s03.html for section
   [java] Writing ch07.html for chapter
   [java] Writing ch08.html for chapter
   [java] Writing ch09.html for chapter
   [java] Writing ch10s02.html for section
   [java] Writing ch10.html for chapter
   [java] Writing ch11.html for chapter
   [java] Writing pt01.html for part
   [java] Writing ix01.html for index
   [java] Writing title.html for book

...snip ...

[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 51 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Mon Jul 21 12:03:38 BRT 2007
[INFO] Final Memory: 5M/10M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------>

The generated manual can be found in the target\drools-documentation$VERSION.jar' file, a compressed archive with all formats.

The manual was first generated into the manual's build directory, as shown below, before being copied across.