Installing IDEA

This guide covers version 10.0 of IDEA, which you can get from here: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/. Instructions for installing & running can be found on the website and in the readme file included with the download.

Creating a DSpace project from an SVN checkout

From the main window, click "Check out from Version Control", then "Subversion".
When it prompts you for a repository, click the "+" icon and enter the URL for the DSpace subversion repository http://scm.dspace.org/svn/repo.
Next, select "dspace" followed by "trunk" and click "checkout", and you will be prompted to choose a directory for the sources.
Select your source, and on the next page ('SVN Checkout Options') elect how you wish the checkout to be structured ('Destination:').
Click OK and when prompted which SVN version to use, select the latest. The source will then be checked-out.

Once the source has been checked out, you will be asked whether you want to create a project (click "Yes").

Select "Import project from external model", then "Maven".
All the options on the subsequent page should be correct (make sure 'Exhaustive search' is ticked, it might not be), so just click "next", and then select 'all', and the 'postgres' (or 'oracle') profile and all the projects.
Then all you have to do is choose a name for the project and click "finish".

Note: If you haven't already defined a JDK, you may not be able to do so at this point, despite being given the option. Instead, create the project without a JDK, then later open the Settings dialog, then go Project Settings -> JDKs and add your JDK here

Building and installing DSpace for the first time

Go to the command line, and go to the root of your new project. Run:

mvn package

These steps might take a while to download all the dependencies, but that should only happen once.

Note: you may notice, if you look in IDEA, that at this stage it will detect a number of web facets. Ignore this for the time being, we will come back to it. They will be available under the flashing cog on the bottom right of the screen for future reference.

After this completes:

in the dspace directory navigate to target/dspace-<version>.dir/ (the version may vary depending on which part of the svn tree you are using) and edit the config/dspace.cfg file according to your local requirements (this is the file that will be deployed into your <dspace> directory).
make sure you have sufficient permissions on your <dspace> directory and that the correct database exists, etc. This is all covered in the install docs, but this differs in one important respect: your user will need to have write permissions on the <dspace> directory. This is because when you run the ant tasks from IDEA they will run with your permissions, and ant update will fail if you can't write to <dspace>.
run ant fresh_install from this directory. You can do this in IDEA by right clicking build.xml, and selecting Add as Ant Build File. When the build file dialog opens, select fresh_install and hit the run button at the top of the panel.

One-click maven builds

Go to "Run" -> "Edit configurations", then click the "+" icon (in top left) and select Maven.

Name

In the name field at the top enter something useful like "mvn clean package" to describe the run task

Parameters Tab

For the "Working directory", you want <dspace-src>/dspace/.
Under "Goals", input "clean package"
In Profiles, put either "postgres" or "oracle", depending on your setup.
In the "Before launch" section, uncheck "make". Everything else should also be unchecked

General Tab

If necessary, check "override" for the Maven Home Directory option and enter the path to your maven install directory (e.g. /usr/share/maven-bin-2.0)
If necessary, check "override" for the Maven User Settings Directory option and enter the path to your settings file (something like ~/.m2/settings.xml)

Runner Tab

Put the path to your "live" config in the properties section at the bottom (the property key is "dspace.config", and the value is the absolute path to your dspace.cfg). The ant fresh_install task from the previous section should have pushed this file into your <dspace> directory.
- For each config, click "Add..", and then add the proper name and value. Minimally, you should specify dspace.config property.
Check the "skip tests" box (advisable, unless you want to run all Unit Tests every time you build)

Once you have this configured, click "Apply" at the bottom and then click "OK".

You should also run it immediately, because the previous build will have the incorrect dspace.cfg built into it. You can do this using the quick launch from the IDEA tool bar: in the center of the toolbar at the top is a pull-down menu which contains all your pre-configured run tasks. Select the one you have named "mvn clean package", and hit the green arrow to the right of it. You should see maven building your project in a window at the bottom of IDEA, and the content will be similar to when you ran it from the command line earlier.

Web Facets

At some point during the above installation process, IDEA may notify you of new web facets detected. These correspond to the individual WAR files and thus web applications which we are working on. If you do not confirm the detection of these facets straight away, they will be available on the bottom left of the screen by clicking on the flashing gear/cog.

Each of these web facets represents a web application provided by DSpace. This will include, for example, the LNI, the JSP-UI, the XML-UI and the OAI interface.

In the dialog, select "Accept". If you ignored the dialog, they should be available under the flashing 'cog' icon at the bottom of your IDEA window.

Deploying DSpace

The next step in getting fully integrated with this IDE is to set it up with ant and tomcat.

Ant Integration

First, set up Ant by clicking the "Ant build" icon on the far right margin of the window.
If you used Ant to build DSpace above, then your previous configuration will remain. Otherwise, add a new one by clicking the "+" icon in the upper left.
Here, you need to select the build.xml file from <dspace-src>/dspace/target/dspace-<version>.dir.
Now, in either case, right click on the top-level of the tree and select "properties" and click "add". In the boxes provided, enter "config" and the path to your live dspace.cfg. Click "OK".

Tomcat Integration

For Tomcat integration, I chose to download and install tomcat 6 in /opt to keep it separate from the 5.5 release that I had previously installed with my package manager. There are a few reasons for this, but mostly it's because we need to assign pretty weak privileges to the tomcat directory because we will be deploying the webapp as a normal user (run something along the lines of chmod -R jim:tomcat /opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.14 ; chmod -R g+rwx /opt/apache-tomcat-6.0.14 as root).

Once you have ant and tomcat ready, you can create a new build configuration for these two.

Go to "Run" -> "Edit Configurations", click the "+" in upper left and select "Tomcat server" -> "Local".

Name

Supply a sensible name for the run task, such as "Tomcat"

Server Tab

Define the application server here; if it is not available in the pull-down menu you can configure it using "Configure"
Uncheck "start browser"; it's a total nuisance having the tomcat target start a new browser every time you run it
Uncheck "make"

Deployment Tab

Select the web facets previously detected to deploy
You may need to click on the "+" and select "Artifact"
From there, select the facet name (e.g. jspui:war, xmlui:war)
- Note: there may be other web facets available, such as dspace-jspui-webapp:war; these can be deployed but are not connected to the dependency libraries so unless you have tomcat set up specifically to use shared dependencies you will get tomcat errors on trying to load these pages; always use the simple named facet (e.g. jspui:war) to deploy.
- You will not be able to deploy any applications which are listed as "Web (dspace-parent)"; this is OK, you just need to deploy the others.
When you are finished click "OK"

Once you have this set up, you can deploy DSpace, by selecting the tomcat deployment from the menu bar, and hitting the green play button next to it. Hit the play button on the opened dialog, and IDEA will deploy the applications at the context paths specified in this section.

Tips

If you leave the "run" dialog boxes open at the bottom, you have a quick way to re-run the build and deployment tasks. The maven build can be re-run by clicking the green icon that looks like ">>", and likewise for the ant + tomcat deployment, except you'll have to click "stop" first, and wait for tomcat to shut down.

Useful plugins

IDEA has loads of plugins available to install. A couple that may be useful are:

SQL Query Plugin
regexPlugin
Jetty Integration
IntelliTail