Installation

bld is fully self-contained in its own jar.

It's not required to install bld because it can be launched by executing the bld jar as such:

java -jar bld-2.1.0.jar

NOTE: if you want to manually obtain bld without using any manager tool, you can download it from GitHub

Use without installation

If you merely want to create a new project, bld can also be used by executing the one-liner below:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://rife2.com/bld/create.sh)"

If you use bld without installation, there's no need to read the rest of this page and you can skip straight to Project Creation.

JBang

If you're using JBang, this can even be done without manually downloading the jar, for instance:

jbang com.uwyn.rife2:bld:2.1.0

SDKMAN!

Alternatively, if you want to have bld easily accessible from your shell, you can also install it with SDKMAN!:

sdk install bld

Homebrew

You can also install it with Homebrew:

brew install rife2/tools/bld

Zip Archive

You can also download the bld-2.1.0.zip archive from the latest release and change your environment so that the bin directory is added to your PATH.

Running bld

Typing java -jar bld-2.1.0.jar or bld is interchangeable, they take the same arguments.

These instructions will focus on bld for convenience.

Two execution modes

When you run bld from a global location, it runs in the project creation and project maintenance mode. The list of available commands are built into bld and are not project-specific.

When you run the bld script that was generated for your project, only the commands that your project declares will be available from the command line.

Try it out! After installing bld, just type:

bld

You'll see the welcome message with a list of commands that are supported, for instance:

Welcome to bld 2.1.0.

The bld CLI provides its features through a series of commands that
perform specific tasks.

The following commands are supported:

  create        Creates a new project from multiple choice
  create-app    Creates a new Java application project
  create-base   Creates a new Java baseline project
  create-lib    Creates a new Java library project
  create-rife2  Creates a new RIFE2 web application project
  help          Provides help about any of the other commands
  upgrade       Upgrades the bld wrapper to the latest version
  version       Outputs the version of the build system

The following bld arguments are supported:

  --offline         Works without Internet (only as first argument)
  -?, -h, --help    Shows the help
  -D<name>=<value>  Sets a JVM system property
  -s, --stacktrace  Prints out the stacktrace for exceptions

You're probably eager to get started, let's create a first project.

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Next learn more about Project Creation