Building and Debugging the Pentaho BA Server with Eclipse

This document explains how to set up a development environment in Eclipse, including how to fork and clone the Git repositories, build them, and debug them using a standalone Java application server and the Eclipse IDE. This document also describes the various projects and a number of build targets important to developing with Pentaho.

Assumptions

You are expected to have a fair amount of knowledge of the Eclipse platform and the Java programming language. If you intend to deploy the platform as a J2EE application, you will also need some experience with J2EE and application servers in general (though this guide only covers Tomcat). Apache Ant knowledge is a plus, but not required to complete these instructions.

If following these instructions fails to result in a working development environment, ask for help on the Pentaho forum. If you discover any errors or omissions in this guide, please email them to nbaker at pentaho.com.

Coding standards and expectations

If you are new to the BI Platform, please take a moment to review the Pentaho coding standards guidelines before continuing.