Skip to main content
Building from source is useful when you want to run the latest unreleased changes, contribute a fix, or embed a custom format plug-in. The build is driven by Apache Maven and produces all three kinds of artifacts — the desktop viewer, the web server, and the standalone format JARs — in a single command.

​
Prerequisites

Before you build, make sure the following are available on your machine:
JDK 25 or higher is required to build from source. The root pom.xml sets maven.compiler.release=25 and the Maven Enforcer plugin enforces requireJavaVersion >= 25, so older JDKs will fail at the validate phase. A JDK 11 runtime is sufficient to run the pre-built viewer or web server JARs, but not to compile them.
Maven 3.9 or higher is required. The Maven Enforcer plugin in the root pom.xml declares [3.9.0,) as the required version range, so older versions will fail at the validate phase.
Verify both tools are on your PATH:

​
macOS Extra Dependencies

On macOS the build script uses GNU coreutils, GNU parallel, and Graphviz. Install them with Homebrew before running the build:

​
Build Steps

​
Version Numbering

Binary Internals uses Maven CI Friendly Versions. The root pom.xml declares <revision>3.7</revision> in its <properties> block, and every child module references that value as ${revision}. This means you can override the version at build time without editing any POM file: mvn clean install -Drevision=3.8-SNAPSHOT.
The flatten-maven-plugin resolves ${revision} before installing or deploying, so the published POM files in your local Maven repository contain the literal version string rather than the placeholder.

​
Running Maven Directly

If you prefer to invoke Maven without the build script (for example, to skip the Javadoc and graph steps), use:
To skip tests and downgrade static-analysis failures to warnings during a quick iteration:
These are the override properties configured in the root pom.xml. -DskipTests is the standard Maven Surefire flag; -Dcheckstyle.failOnViolation=false and -Dspotbugs.failOnError=false downgrade those checks from build-breaking errors to warnings rather than skipping them entirely.