Compiling Freenet from Source

Once you have downloaded the source code (Instructions here) you will see there is a freenet directory with these files:

The build.xml file is similar to the Makefiles you often get with C/C++ programs. It contains all the information necessary to build freenet from the source. To do this, you need a program called ant∞. You should be able to build Freenet just by changing to this directory and running this simple command:

This should compile all the source code and output a file called freenet-cvs-snapshot.jar in the lib directory. You can then stop Freenet, copy this to your main Freenet installation and overwrite the freenet.jar file with it, then restart Freenet again.

Note that if you do ant distclean, you will need jflex installed to rebuild the CSS parser.