Building Orekit Tutorials

Orekit Tutorials can be built from source using several different tools.

All these tools are Java based and can run on many different operating systems, including Unix, GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. Some GNU/Linux distributions provide these tools in their packages repositories.

Building with Maven 3

Maven is a build tool that goes far beyond simply compiling and packaging a product. It is also able to resolve dependencies (including downloading the appropriate versions from the public repositories), to run automated tests, to launch various checking tools and to create a web site for a project. It runs on any platform supporting Java.

For systems not providing maven as a package, maven can be downloaded from its site at the Apache Software Foundation. This site also explains the installation procedure.

As with all maven enabled projects, building official released versions of Orekit Tutorials is straightforward (see below for the special case of development versions), simply run:

mvn compile

This command should always work for released Orekit Tutorials versions as they always depend only on released Orekit & Hipparchus versions. Maven knows how to download the pre-built binary for released Hipparchus versions. The previous command may not work for development Orekit Tutorials versions as they may depend on unreleased Orekit or Hipparchus versions. Maven cannot download pre-built binaries for unreleased Orekit or Hipparchus versions as none are publicly available. In this case the command above will end with an error message like:

[ERROR] Failed to execute goal on project orekit-tutorials: Could not resolve dependencies for project org.orekit:orekit-tutorials:jar:X.Y-SNAPSHOT: Could not find artifact org.orekit:orekit:jar:X.Y-SNAPSHOT

In this case, you should build the missing Orekit or Hipparchus artifact and install it in your local maven repository beforehand. This is done by cloning the Hipparchus source from Hipparchus git repository at GitHub in some temporary folder and install it with maven. This is done by running the commands below (using Linux command syntax):

Once the Orekit & Hipparchus development versions has been installed locally using the previous commands, you can delete the cloned folder if you want. You can then attempt again the mvn command at Orekit Tutorials level, this time it should succeed as the necessary artifact is now locally available.

If you need to configure a proxy server for dependencies retrieval, see the Guide to using proxies page at the maven site.

For other commands like generating the site, or generating the checkstyle, spotbugs see the maven plugins documentation at maven site.

Building with Eclipse

Eclipse is a very rich Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It is a huge product and not a simple build tool.

For systems not providing eclipse as a package, it can be downloaded from its site at the Eclipse Foundation.

The simplest way to use Orekit Tutorials with Eclipse is to follow these steps:

  • using your operating system tools, unpack the source distribution directly inside your Eclipse workspace. The source distribution file name has a name of the form orekit-tutorials-x.y-sources.zip where x.y is the version number. Unpacking this zip file should create a folder of the form orekit-tutorials-x.y in your workspace.

  • using Eclipse, import the project by selecting in the top level “File” menu the entry “Import…”

  • in the wizard that should appear, select “Maven -> Existing Maven Projects”

  • select the folder you just created in your workspace by unpacking the source distribution. The “pom.xml” file describing the project will be automatically selected. Click finish

The Orekit Tutorials library should be configured automatically, including the dependency to the underlying mathematical library.

Now you have an orekit-tutorials-x.y project in you workspace, and you can create your own application projects that will depend on the Orekit Turotials project.

You can also check everything works correctly by running one of the example tutorial.