license: Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the “License”); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

       http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

     Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
     software distributed under the License is distributed on an
     "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
     KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
     specific language governing permissions and limitations
     under the License.

layout: default title: Building PDFBox

Building from Source

Building PDFBox from source is only necessary if you're wanting to contribute code to the PDFBox project. Most users should use the binary releases instead.

Obtaining the Source

You can obtain the latest source of PDFBox from our SVN repo. The current trunk is 3.0.0-SNAPSHOT. There is a separate branch for the 1.8.x and the 2.0.x series. You can fetch the latest trunk version using Subversion:

svn checkout http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/pdfbox/trunk/
cd trunk

You can also browse the Subversion repository using ViewVC.

We also have a read-only Git mirror which is further mirrored to GitHub as apache/pdfbox.

The sources for the Java ImageIO plugin for the JBIG2 image format are available in the Apache Git Repository or can be loaded from GitHub:

git clone https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/pdfbox-jbig2.git
cd pdfbox-jbig2

Build dependencies

PDFBox 1.8

JDK 5 or 6
Maven 3

PDFBox 2.0

JDK 7
Java Cryptography Extension (JCE)
Maven 3

Java ImageIO plugin for JBIG2

JDK 6
Maven 3

Java Cryptography Extension (JCE)

Building PDFBox 2.0 requires a JDK with “unlimited strength” cryptography, which requires extra files to be installed. For JDK 7, see Java Cryptography Extension (JCE). If these files are not installed, building PDFBox will fail the following test:

TestPublicKeyEncryption.setUp:70 JCE unlimited strength jurisdiction policy files are not installed

Building with Maven

In the root directory of PDFBox:

mvn clean install

Building with Ant (Deprecated, removed in 2.0.0)

The old Ant build is still available, and can be used especially for building .NET binaries with IKVM:

Install ANT. PDFBox currently uses 1.6.2 but other versions probably work as well.
(optional) Setup IKVM, if you want to build the .NET DLL version of PDFBox.
1. IKVM binaries
2. In the build.properties, set the ikvm.dir property:
  ikvm.dir=C:\\javalib\\ikvm-12-07-2004\\ikvm
Run “ant” from the root PDFBox directory. This will create the .zip package distribution. See the build file for other ant targets.

NOTE: If you want to run PDFBox from an IDE them you will need to add the ‘Resources’ directory to the project classpath in your IDE.

Dependencies for Ant Builds

The above instructions expect that you‘re using Maven or another build tool like Ivy that supports Maven dependencies. If you instead use tools like Ant where you need to explicitly include all the required library jars in your application, you’ll need to do something different.

The easiest approach is to run mvn dependency:copy-dependencies inside the pdfbox directory of the latest PDFBox source release. This will copy all the required and optional libraries discussed above into the pdfbox/target/dependencies directory. You can then simply copy all the libraries you need from this directory to your application.