Note to developers: This is a very brief overview. There is more infomation on the JMeter Wiki.

Building Add-Ons

There is no need to build JMeter if you just want to build an add-on. Just download the binary archive and add the jars to the classpath. You may want to also download the source so it can be used by the IDE.

See the extras/addons* files in the source tree for some suggestions

Building JMeter

Acquiring the source

The full source is distributed alongside the binary, or it can be downloaded from SVN.

The source archive and SVN do not contain any of the required library files. These need to be downloaded by running the Ant command:

ant download_jars

Or you can download the binary distribution archive for a release and unpack it into the same directory structure as the source. This will ensure that the lib/ directory contains the jar files needed for running JMeter. There are a few additional jars that are needed to build JMeter, download these using:

ant download_jars

This will retrieve any missing jars.

Compiling and packaging JMeter using Ant

JMeter can be built entirely using Ant. The basic command is:

ant [install]

See build.xml for the other targets that can be used.

Compiling and packaging JMeter using Eclipse

Once you have downloaded the source from SVN or the release archives and run the ant download_jars target to install the dependent jars, you can configure Eclipse. The easiest way to do this is to replace the Eclipse .classpath file with the eclipse.classpath file provided with JMeter. This will set up the source-paths and most of the libraries.

See also the file eclipse.readme.