Quick start

Ok, so you like the idea and want to start using it.

Here is a very quick guide on how to become productive right away.

Download the latest Centipede distribution and unpack it to a directory of your choice.

Alternatively, for CVS lovers, download Centipede from CVS to a directory of your choice.

Add <centipede install dir>/bin to your path.

Ok, so you have some code and want to use Centipede to build. The easiest way to start a new project is to get hold of the krysalis-project template (this is part of the krysalis-templates CVS module) and copy this template into your new directory

• Put the code under src/java.
• Put the required libraries under lib
• Edit the files module.xml and status.xml to make Centipede know all about your project and community.
• Go in the root dir of your project and type cent, you'll get an interactive menu of the build options available.

That's it. To compile run cent compile, to make the jars run cent jar and to clean the build directory run cent clean.

Ok, so you like the idea and want to start using it, but have legacy Ant targets to use and a directory structure that is not like the default Centipede one.

No problem, you just need a few more steps to put Centipede in your project build, but it's easy.

• Add module.xml, status.xml, properties.xml, centibuild.xml to your project root dir (you can get them from the template project mentioned above).
• Edit module.xml and status.xml to make Centipede know all about your project and community.
• If your directory layout is different from the default Centipede one, edit the properties.xml file to tell Centipede where things are.
• Copy your custom ant targets from your build.xml to centibuild.xml.
• To make the java compile step depend on your custom task add this to centibuild.xml

<target name="compile" depends="mytask,java.antlib.compile" />
<target name="mytask" >
</target>

• See the cent documentation for details on how to use each cent.

The centipede build system is configured using a number of configuratio files. These are introduced here, and discussed in more details in later sections of this How To.

centibuild.xml

This is an ANT build file that is used to build the project. The reason it is not called build.xml as is normally the case for ANT build files is that we felt some projects might like to provide a vanilla ANT build script as well. These would not provide all the advantages of Centipede, but would allow the application to be built without the need to download Centipede (since many developers already have ANT).

module.xml

This is an extended Gump module descriptor. It contains information about the project and its dependencies.

properties.xml

This file is used to override the default configuration properties of Centipede antlibs.

status.xml

Not strictly speaking a configuration file, this contains information about the status of the project. It is used to generate release documents and todo lists amongst other things.