Building vmvt¶

The vmvt GitHub repository contains two modules (core and cli). The core module is used for the actual logic, and the cli module provides a simple command line interface. Both modules can be built using maven, as usual. The following command builds the library and the app and displays a help message on the shell.

git clone https://github.com/TheJacksonLaboratory/vmvt
cd vmvt
java -jar vmvt-cli/target/vmvt.jar -h

Using jpackage¶

vmvt is a Java 11 app. We are experimenting with jpackage to build standalone command-line interface applications. For this, we need to download the jpackage app for the OS for which we desire to create the standalone app. Gluon has made these packages available for Java 11.

Creating an installer for Mac¶

We will demonstrate the process for the Mac. Note that we are assuming that you have Java 11 and Java 14 installed on your machine.

First, set JAVA_HOME (temporarily) to the value for Java 14.

export JAVA_HOME=`/usr/libexec/java_home -v 14`

You can check that the above command has worked by entering echo $JAVA_HOME, which should reveal the correct path (e.g., /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-14.0.1.jdk/Contents/Home).

We can now run jpackage as follows (adjust the path to the downloaded jpackage executable as needed). First change directory into the vmvt-cli subdirectory and then execute this command.

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/jdk-14.0.1.jdk/Contents/Home/bin/jpackage \
    --input target/ \
    --name VmvtCli \
    --main-jar target/vmvt-cli.jar \
    --main-class org.monarchinitiative.vmvt.cli.Main \
    --type dmg

<Note: to do not working yet!>