You need Apache Maven to compile the code, and a SQL database to house the Gerrit2 metadata. PostgreSQL is currently the only supported database.

To create a new client workspace:

mkdir gerrit2
cd gerrit2
repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/tools/manifest.git

Important Links

Google Web Toolkit:

Apache Maven:

PostgreSQL:

Apache SSHD:

Setting up the Database

You'll need to configure your development workspace to use a database gwtorm supports (or add the necessary dialect support to gwtorm, and then configure your workspace anyway).

cd src/main/java
cp GerritServer.properties_example GerritServer.properties

Now edit GerritServer.properties to uncomment the database you are going to use, and possibly update properties such as "user" and "password" to reflect the actual connection information used.

# PostgreSQL
database.driver = org.postgresql.Driver
database.url = jdbc:postgresql:reviewdb
database.user = gerrit2
database.password = letmein

PostgreSQL Setup

Initialize and start PostgreSQL (where $data is the location of your data):

initdb --locale en_US.UTF-8 -D $data
postmaster -D $data >/tmp/logfile 2>&1 &

Create the JDBC user as a normal user (no superuser access) and assign it an encrypted password:

createuser -A -D -P -E gerrit2

Create the database listed in your GerritServer.properties and set the JDBC user as the owner of that database:

createdb -E UTF-8 -O gerrit2 reviewdb

Configuring Eclipse

If you want to use the Eclipse IDE for development work, please see Eclipse Setup for more details on how to configure your workspace.

Building

From the command line:

mvn clean package

Output WAR will be placed in:

target/gerrit-*.war

When debugging browser specific issues use gwtStyle DETAILED so the resulting JavaScript more closely matches the Java sources. For example, this can help narrow down what code line 30,400 in the JavaScript happens to be.

mvn package -DgwtStyle=DETAILED

On Mac OS X ensure Java For Mac OS X 10.5 Upate 4 has been installed, and that JAVA_HOME is set to /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6/Home. You can check this by running java -version and looking for build 1.6.0_13-b03-211. Versions of Java 6 prior to this version crash during the build due to a bug in the JIT compiler.

Production Compile

Always use

  mvn clean package

to create a production build. The ./to_hosted.sh script that setups the development environment for Eclipse hosted mode also creates a state that produces a corrupt production build.

Final Setup

Since you are creating a Gerrit instance for testing, you need to also follow the other steps outlined under "Initialize the Schema" in the Installation Guide:

Client-Server RPC

The client-server RPC implementation is gwtjsonrpc, not the stock RPC system that comes with GWT. This buys us automatic XSRF protection. It also makes all of the messages readable and writable by any JSON implementation, facilitating "mashups" and 3rd party clients.

The programming API is virtually identical (you just need to extend RemoteJsonService instead of RemoteService).

Why GWT?

We like it. Plus we can write Java code once and run it both in the browser and on the server side.

Part of Gerrit Code Review