octool — building Opencast with style

What is it?

It’s a tool to help you build Opencast. If you don’t know what Opencast is, please do not read on.

What’s the problem building Opencast, you say? It’s nothing major, really, but…

• it has a lot of stuff going to standard output and standard error.
• you have to remember certain settings, like “how do I turn off tests again?”
• building something “relative to a certain git version” is not possible“

and a few other things that just annoyed me after a while, so I wrote this tool.

Installation

Out of sheer lazyness (pun intended), I currently depend wholly on the Nix package manager to build it. With it, however, building it is trivial:

nix-build

Without it…well, it’s not possible.

Usage

Your working directory has to be the Opencast root directory. Then just call it, possibly with --help to discover its options. They should be self-explanatory:

Global

Usage: octool COMMAND

Available options:
  -h,--help                Show this help text

Available commands:
  create-ca                create a new capture agent
  show-last-log            show the last (re-)build log
  rebuild                  rebuild parts of (or all of) Opencast

create-ca

Usage: octool create-ca --create-ca ARG
  create a new capture agent

Available options:
  --create-ca ARG          create a capture agent on the locally running
                           instance
  -h,--help                Show this help text

show-last-log

Usage: octool show-last-log
  show the last (re-)build log

Available options:
  -h,--help                Show this help text

rebuild

Usage: octool rebuild [--relative-to ARG] [--clean] [--modules ARG] [--stdout]
                      [--yes] [--no] [--no-checkstyle] [--no-tests]
                      [--target-assembly ARG]
  rebuild parts of (or all of) Opencast

Available options:
  --relative-to ARG        rebuild only modules changed since the version
                           specified
  --clean                  clean before build
  --modules ARG            rebuild this specific modules (and dependents
                           thereof)
  --stdout                 output stdout, too
  --yes                    say "yes" to everything
  --no                     say "no" to everything
  --no-checkstyle          disable checkstyle
  --no-tests               disable tests
  --target-assembly ARG    use the specified assembly instead of develop
  -h,--help                Show this help text