How-to set up and run Shale

Getting a Shale installation up and running can be a fairly difficult process given Shale's newness. Before you even start with Shale you'll need to download and install a few applications you will need later once Shale is actually built.

1.) First off make sure you have Java installed with JAVA_HOME correctly configured.

2.) Next, download and install the latest version of maven from: http://maven.apache.org/download.html

Installing Maven is a fairly simple process. Just unzip to your directory of choice and set-up the classpath to point to Maven's /bin directory.

3.) Now, download and install Apache Tomcat from: http://tomcat.apache.org/ Tomcat will be used to allow access to Shale once built.

4.) With all this down you can finally download Shale itself. Shale comes in several different flavors designed to suit a varity of different needs. For our purposes we'll be using the blank shale application. This version of Shale is specifically designed to allow easy development and is available at: http://people.apache.org/dist/shale/v1.0.3/shale-blank-1.0.3.zip
A full list of all Shale versions is at: http://people.apache.org/dist/shale/v1.0.3/

Unzip to the directory you wish to develop from and open a console in the top-level Shale directory. Now make sure you have an active internet connection and run the command "mvn" this will invoke Maven using the pom.xml in the same directory. Maven will download all dependencies and build the blank Shale application in the form of "shale-blank.war"

5.) Finally its time to actually run this newly built Shale application. Start Tomcat if you haven't already and drop the "shale-blank.war" file into "YOUR_TOMCAT_DIR/webapps" directory. Now you can view the extremely simple empty-shale application at:

http://127.0.0.1:8080/shale-blank/