Secrets of building JHOVE2

The current beta of JHOVE2 is rather tricky to build. With some help from Marisa Strong, I’ve managed to do it. Here’s a guide which may be helpful.

1. Download JHOVE2. If you have Mercurial, follow the instructions. Otherwise use the “Get Source” menu item to get the .gz file.

2. Get a current version of Maven if you don’t have one.

3. If got the gzip file, expand it and the tarball which it contains. This will create a main directory.

4. cd main. The first recommendation is to run mv compile, but this apparently requires an environment which isn’t released yet, so instead do

mvn assembly:assembly -DskipTests

5. cd into the target directory. This will have the file jhove2-2.0.0.zip. Unzip this in place.

6. The directory jhove2-2.0.0 was just created. cd into it. This contains the script jhove2.sh. Run this from the command line with no arguments, and you’ll get a usage message if everything worked correctly.

To do stuff with JHOVE2, the user guide (PDF) is helpful.