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Jackrabbit Standalone

The Jackrabbit Standalone component is a runnable jar that contains everything you need to run Jackrabbit as a standalone server process. The server manages a Jackrabbit content repository and makes it available to clients via WebDAV and RMI. You can download the standalone server jar from the Downloads page.

Running the standalone server

You only need the version 1.4 or higher of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to run the Jackrabbit standalone server. To start the server, double-click on the standalone jar file, or invoke it on the command line.

$ java -jar jackrabbit-standalone-1.5.0.jar
Welcome to Apache Jackrabbit!
-------------------------------
Using repository directory jackrabbit
Writing log messages to jackrabbit/log
Starting the server...
Apache Jackrabbit is now running at http://localhost:8080/
^C
Shutting down the server...
-------------------------------
Goodbye from Apache Jackrabbit!

By default the server will look for a content repository in the ./jackrabbit directory and a repository configuration file in a repository.xml file within the repository directory. The repository directory is automatically created if it does not already exist, and a configuration file with the default configuration is created if no configuration is found.

Server, access, and repository log messages are written to log files in the log subdirectory within the repository repository directory.

You can stop the server by pressing Ctrl-C or by sending it a standard termination signal. The server will then shutdown the content repository and exit cleanly.

Command line options

You can customize the operation of the standalone server with the following command line options (with defaults in parenthesis).

$ java -jar jackrabbit-standalone-1.5.0.jar --help
usage: java -jar jackrabbit-standalone-1.5.0-SNAPSHOT.jar [-?] [-c <arg>]
       [-d] [-f <arg>] [-h <arg>] [-l] [-n] [-p <arg>] [-q] [-r <arg>]
 -?,--help         print this message
 -c,--conf <arg>   repository configuration file
 -d,--debug        enable debug logging
 -f,--file <arg>   location of this jar file
 -h,--host <arg>   IP address of the HTTP server
 -l,--license      print license information
 -n,--notice       print copyright notices
 -p,--port <arg>   TCP port of the HTTP server (8080)
 -q,--quiet        disable console output
 -r,--repo <arg>   repository directory (jackrabbit)

You may want to increase the maximum amount of heap memory available to the Java virtual machine especially if you plan to have lots of concurrent clients accessing the repository or want to perform large batch operations.

$ java -Xmx256m -jar jackrabbit-standalone-1.5.0.jar

Drawbacks

The Jackrabbit Standalone server is designed primarily as a quick and easy way to get a content repository up and running for testing and development purposes. For more complex deployment scenarios and configuration options you should look at the Jackrabbit Web Application and Jackrabbit JCA Resource Adapter packages.

Note also that JCR-RMI layer has not been optimized for performance, so currently the recommendation for accessing the JCR API in performance critical applications is to have the repository running locally in the same process as the client application.