Jena includes various command-line utilities which can help you with a variety of tasks in developing Jena-based applications.
An environment variable JENA_HOME
is used by all the command line tools to configure the class path automatically for you. You can set this up as follows:
On Linux / Mac
export JENA_HOME=
the directory you downloaded Jena toexport PATH=$PATH:$JENA_HOME/bin
On Windows
SET JENA_HOME =
the directory you downloaded Jena toSET PATH=%PATH%;%JENA_HOME%\bat
Once you've done the above you should now be able to run the tools from the command line like so:
On Linux / Mac
sparql --version
On Windows
sparql.bat --version
This command will simply print the versions of Jena and ARQ used in your distribution, all the tools support the --version
option. To find out how to use a specific tool add the --help
flag instead.
Note that many examples of using Jena tools typically use the Linux style invocation because most of the Jena developers work on Linux/Mac platforms. When running on windows simply add .bat
as an extension to the name of the command line tool to run it, on some versions of Windows this may not be required.
If you receive errors stating that a class is not found then it is most likely that JENA_HOME
is not set correctly. As a quick sanity check you can try the following to see if it is set appropriately:
On Linux / Mac
cd $JENA_HOME
On Windows
cd %JENA_HOME%
If this command fails then JENA_HOME
is not correctly set, please ensure you have set it correctly and try again.
Windows users may experience problems if trying to run the tools when their JENA_HOME
path contains spaces in it, there are two workarounds for this:
See Reading and Writing RDF in Apache Jena for more information.
riot
: parse RDF data, guessing the syntax from the file extension. Assumes that standard input is N-Quads/N-Triples unless you tell it otherwise with the --syntax
parameter. riot
can also do RDFS inferencing, count triples, convert serializations, validate syntax, concatenate datasets, and more.
turtle
, ntriples
, nquads
, trig
, rdfxml
: specialized versions of riot
that assume that the input is in the named serialization.
rdfparse
: parse an RDF/XML document, for which you can usually just use riot
, but this can also pull triples out of rdf:RDF
elements embedded at arbitrary places in an XML document if you need to deal with those.
See ARQ - Command Line Applications for more about these.
arq
and sparql
: run a query in a file named as a command line parameter on a dataset in one or more files named as command line parameters.
qparse
: parse a query, report on any problems, and output a pretty-printed version of the query.
uparse
: do the same thing as qparse
but for update requests.
rsparql
: send a local query to a SPARQL endpoint specified with a URL, giving you the same choice of output formats that arq
does.
rupdate
: send a local update query to a SPARQL endpoint specified with a URL, assuming that is accepting updates from you.
The following utilities let you work with data stored using a local Fuseki triplestore. They can be useful for automating queries and updates of data stored there. Each requires an assembler file pointing at a dataset as a parameter; Fuseki creates these for you.
For each pair of utilities shown, the first is used with data stored using the TDB format and the second with data stored using the newer and more efficient TDB2 format.
The TDB and TDB2 - Command Line Tools pages describe these further.
tdbquery
, tdb2.tdbquery
: query a dataset that has been stored with Fuseki.
tdbdump
, tdb2.tdbdump
: dump the contents of a Fuseki dataset to standard out.
tdbupdate
, tdb2.tdbupdate
: run an update request against a Fuseki dataset.
tdbloader
, tdb2.tdbloader
: load a data from a file into a Fuseki dataset.
tdbstats
, tdb2.tdbstats
: output a short report of information about a Fuseki dataset.
tdbbackup
, tdb2.tdbbackup
: create a gzipped copy of the Fuseki dataset's triples.
tdbcompact
, tdb2.tdbcompact
: reduce the size of the Fuseki dataset.
shacl
: validate a dataset against a set of shapes and constraints described in a file that conforms to the W3C SHACL standard. Jena's SHACL page has more on this utility.
shex
: validate data using ShEx from the W3C Shape Expressions Community Group. Jena's ShEx page has more on this utility.
rdfdiff
: compare the triples in two datasets, regardless of their serializations, and list which are different between the two datasets. (Modeled on the UNIX diff
utility.)
iri
: Parse a IRI and tell you about it, with errors and warnings. Good for checking for issues like proper escaping.