It is not necessary to rebuild Electric from the source code because the downloads are ready to run. For people who wish to explore the source code, this section describes some of the necessary steps.

The first step in building the source code is to extract it from the ".jar" file. To do this, place the ".jar" file in its own directory, change to that directory, and run the following command:

jar xf electric-version.jar
(Windows users may want to install "cygwin," from www.cygwin.com, in order to more easily run "jar" and other commands.) The "jar" command will create a number of files and folders on your disk:

The next step is to get a version of Java that can build source code. Although a "JRE" (Java Runtime Environment) is sufficient for running Electric, it is not able to build the source code. For that, you must have a "JDK" (Java Development Kit). In addition, you may want to use an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) such as NetBeans (at www.netbeans.org) or Eclipse (at www.eclipse.org).

Running under Eclipse

Here are some notes about building Electric under Eclipse:

Using Ant

"Ant" is a scripting system for building Java programs, and Electric comes with an Ant script file called "build.xml". Once the source code is extracted, you can build Electric simply by typing Ant commands. The Ant target "runFromBin" will build and run Electric. The Ant target "jarForGNUBinary" will build a new ".jar" file from the source code.

Note that when using Ant, there are some Macintosh vs. non-Macintosh issues to consider.