How to use BuildTools

TARDIS is always compiled against the latest version of Spigot. Spigot is being constantly updated, and sometimes TARDIS takes advantage of the new features that have been added to the Spigot API. This means that if you don’t keep your server JAR file up-to-date, then TARDIS may not be able to run properly.

Spigot has released a tool called BuildTools that allows you to get the latest version of Spigot (as well as the Spigot API — but only plugin developers need to worry about that).

Using BuildTools is a slightly tricky process to setup the first time around, but if you follow the steps below, they will hopefully help you get it right :)

If you have problems, BuildTools is run nightly on the TARDIS Jenkins server — you can download Spigot and Spigot-API from there.

This guide is for Windows , if you use Linux, then you probably already have a good idea how to do this sort of thing — just follow Spigot’s instructions

Getting the right tools

To compile Spigot you will need three things:

1. The BuildTools JAR — you can download that here: https://hub.spigotmc.org/jenkins/job/BuildTools/
2. The Java Software Development Kit (JDK) — download from the Oracle wbsite: https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/#java17 — you probably have Java installed already, but you need this version to actually build anything from code
3. GitHub for Windows — Get it here: https://windows.github.com

Once you have downloaded the three required tools:

1. Put BuildTools.jar file in its own folder, for example Downloads\BuildTools\
2. Install the Java (JDK) — it will most probably install at C:\Program Files\Java\jdk17.0.2\
3. Install GitHub (let it add shortcuts to your desktop), start it up, and create a free account

Setting up to build the server JARs

You are going to be running BuildTools from the GitHub command line, but before you do that you will need to set up a Java system variable.

Follow these next steps to do that:

1. Open an Explorer window, right-click Computer and choose Properties — this should open the Control Panel to System information
2. On the left hand side click Advanced system settings
3. In the System properties window that comes up click Environment variables…
4. In the bottom ( System variables ) section click the New… button
5. For Variable name type JAVA_HOME
6. for Variable value type the path to your JDK installation, for example: C:/Program Files/Java/jdk17.0.2/
7. click OK, OK, Apply etc

Building the server JARs

Almost there! The last step is to actually compile the server JAR files.

1. Open Git Shell from the desktop shortcut
2. The shell opens in your user directory, so you need to get to the folder where you put the BuildTools.jar file. Use the cd command to change to the right directory, for example: cd Downloads/BuildTools
3. Now you can start the build process, type java -jar BuildTools.jar
4. Let the programme do its thing, it will download everything it needs, and takes about 10 minutes to compile the JARs when run for the first time — subsequent builds will be much quicker.

Once the process is complete, you will find the Spigot JAR waiting for you in the BuildTools folder.

Keeping up-to-date

Once you have it all setup, it is easy to keep your server up-to-date — just redo the steps under the Building the server JARs heading. BuildTools will fetch the latest code changes and produce a new set of server JARs.