12. February 2013

Building JBoss AS 7.1.3.Final

There have been recently much discussion about the missing binary downloads of JBoss AS 7.1.2.Final and 7.1.3.Final. To keep the long story short, here are just the most important facts: The latest version of AS7 available on the download page is 7.1.1.Final which has been release about a year ago. But if you have a look at the AS7 GitHub repository, you will notice tags for 7.1.2.Final and 7.1.3.Final.

To be honest, I don't fully understand the reason for this. But that's the current situation. So if you want JBoss AS 7.1.3.Final, you have to build it yourself.

It seems like most people think that the process of compiling AS7 is difficult. But it is not. It is actually pretty straight forward and only takes about 10 minutes.

The first step is of cause to download the sources. Fortunately GitHub provides downloadable ZIP files for all tags.

$ wget https://github.com/jbossas/jboss-as/archive/7.1.3.Final.zip
$ unzip 7.1.3.Final.zip
$ cd jboss-as-7.1.3.Final/

Now you have to start the build by entering this command:

$ ./build.sh -DskipTests -Drelease=true install

This command requires some explanation. The build.sh file is a helper script that performs some additional checks to ensure you are using the correct Maven version. I also recommend to use -DskipTests to skip the test suite which will reduce the overall build time dramatically. You also have to set -Drelease=true to ensure the build creates the distribution archives.

The compilation took about 9 minutes on my box. After the build completed you will find the ZIP distribution in the dist/target directory:

$ ls -1 dist/target/*.zip
dist/target/jboss-as-7.1.3.Final-src.zip
dist/target/jboss-as-7.1.3.Final.zip

That's all. Simple, isn't it? So you see there is no reason for not building AS7 yourself. :)