A simple build script template for using BaseX (8.2) with Gradle. Also adds Saxon 9.6 so you can use XSLT 2.0 out of the gate.

Caution: this is still in very early stage.

Installation steps:

1. git clone https://github.com/xokomola/basex-gradle-starter.git

Yep, that's right. There's only one step between wanting to use this and running queries with Basex. It even installs Gradle for you.

To see what tasks are available:

gradlew tasks

To execute other tasks:

gradlew <taskname>

For more information on Gradle have a look at it's extensive documentation.

Most of the familiar startup scripts are all available as tasks:

• gui
• console
• server and serverstop
• http, httpstart and httpstop

Configuration of BaseX is done in gradle.properties.

By default will put all data under the basex subdirectory.

gradlew create -Pdb=dbname -Pdir=~/tmp/xml

gradlew export -Pdb=dbname -Pdir=~/tmp/export

To run a simple query:

gradlew query -Pq="1+1"

To run all tests under basex/webapp:

gradlew xqtest

See the BaseX documentation on commands. To execute BaseX commands from a file:

gradle command -Pc=commands.bxs

To execute BaseX commands provided as a string on the command line:

gradle command -Pc="get chop"

And by using the --daemon option you can also avoid a lot of the Java startup tax.

gradlew --daemon query

For now the assumes that both source and tests are in basex/webapp (or wherever you point org.basex.WEBPATH property in gradle.properties to).

Gradle introduced "continous builds". If you want all tests to run automatically when test scripts or XQuery source code changes use this:

gradlew -t xqtest

You've created an application, running and testing it using this build script. Now it's time to distribute the application.

gradlew distZip

This creates a Zip with the application and start scripts.

See also: Gradle Application Plugin

You can combine all the needed jar files and create a so-called fat jar. This allows you to run BaseX as a jar (easy to deploy). You can already do that with the BaseX core distribution but with this it also includes the optional libraries.

gradlew shadowJar

This will create a jar (we do not have local classes yet) inside build/libs. The task will build both a jar with local code and another one with all dependencies (postfixed with -all).

Run the server:

java -Dorg.basex.dbpath=basex/data
     -Dorg.basex.repopath=basex/repo 
     -Dorg.basex.webpath=basex/web
     -jar build/libs/basex-gradle-start-0.1-all.jar

Note that you will have to pass the paths (and possibly other settings). In this case I passed the paths to the project files. You can also use all the regular basexhttp command-line arguments if you wish.

For example start the HTTP server on a different port:

java -Dorg.basex.dbpath=basex/data
     -Dorg.basex.repopath=basex/repo 
     -Dorg.basex.webpath=basex/web
     -jar build/libs/basex-gradle-start-0.1-all.jar
     -h1234

The name of the jar is the name of the project. The version is set from within build.gradle.

To connect to this server you could also use the same jar (from another shell window):

java -cp build/lib/basex-gradle-start-0.1-all.jar org.basex.BaseXClient

This is a Gradle limitation. Gradle doesn't follow transitive dependencies that are declared as optional. This makes sense but it's a bit unfortunate that to include these optional libraries they have to be explicitly listed in the build script.

• Client task (console) prints build progress message in between input. This is confusing.

• Sometimes I cannot access the server with console from another shell. Run it with -d option and you'll see that it cannot acquire a lock

• Task distZip also packs basex directory but when running it it still uses the dir from the project. Need to do better config to set the paths.

• xokomola
• vincentml

• Run only specific tests (xqtest always runs all tests)
• Better configuration
• Provide arguments for query tasks
• Packaging as WAR for Tomcat etc.
• Building XAR packages and managing module repository
• Backup and restore