Appendix C   Building FreeMarker

If you want to modify the source code and rebuild freemarker.jar, you need Ant 1.6.1 (or newer) and JDK 5 (or newer). If these are satisfied, just run Ant from the root directory of the distribution, and it will create the new freemarker.jar. Note that for the very first build you must be on-line, because the build task will download a lot of required dependencies (about 20 MB) into the lib subdirectory of distribution root directory.

Maybe you should check the new jar file against our test suite. This is done by running Ant with test target (go to the root directory of the distribution, and issue "ant test"). If the test fails, read the resulting .txt file in the build/testcase directory for more details.

Note that building a full distribution, which includes the FreeMarker Manual and the off-line Web site, is not possible purely from the source code that is included with the distribution. You will have to check out the "docgen" and "site" sub-projects from the SVN repository of FreeMarker for that.