Checking Out the Source

Synapse development trunk is where all the latest development work takes place. This is located at https://github.com/apache/synapse.git. Any developer with a Git client should be able to checkout the latest source from this Github location but only Synapse committers are allowed to actually commit source code.

If you want to browse the source code of an older release of Synapse or want to implement a patch for a past release, you may checkout the relevant source tree from one of the available Github tags.

Building from Source

To build all the modules and the Synapse binary distribution, go to the root of the Synapse source tree and execute the following Maven command.

This will fetch all the required dependencies, compile the source, run the tests and build the Synapse modules and the binary pack. Please note that building with tests takes time. To build without the tests, use the following Maven command.

Developers and committers making changes to the Synapse code base are highly recommended to always build the source 'WITH' the tests. This will ensure that changes do not introduce any obvious regression errors. However, running all the tests does not guarantee that a particular change will not introduce any regressions. Therefore, care must be exercised whenever making changes to the existing code.

Synapse source tree is organized into several modules. If required, you can build only a selected module by going into the appropriate module and executing one of the above build commands.

Setting Up the Development Environment

Apache Synapse development can be based on a number of tools ranging from simple command line tools like Vim and Emacs to full fledged Java IDEs like Eclipse, IntelliJ Idea and Netbeans. If Eclipse or Idea is used to develop code for Synapse, Maven can be used to build the necessary project artifacts.

Simply run the following commands to generate the project artifacts and then use your IDE to open up the Synapse code base as a Java project.

Integration Tests

Starting from Synapse 2.1, a suite of integration tests are included in the Synapse code base. These tests automate various samples included in the Synapse binary distribution and provide a convenient way to sanity check a Synapse distribution and find any regressions. If you build the source tree from the root without skipping the test cases, these integration tests will be executed by Maven as a part of the build process. If you just need to run the integration tests simply go into the modules/integration directory in the source tree and run the usual Maven build command.

Synapse integration test suite uses the Maven Surefire plugin. Therefore, all tests will generate a report which will be available in the modules/integration/target/surefire-reports directory. If you ever encounter a failure while running the integration tests, this is the first place to check.

You can pass additional parameters to the Synapse integration test framework and limit the number of tests executed by Maven. For an example if you simply want to run sample 10 in the integration test framework, run the following command.

You can also run a list of known samples as an integration test.

Synapse samples are categorized into several sections. If needed you can run all the samples in a particular section.

Following values can be passed in as the value of the 'suite' parameter.

• message
• endpoint
• qos
• proxy
• tasks
• advanced

Debugging Tests

Maven allows you to remote debug tests at build time. To make use of this feature simply run the Maven build command with the -Dmaven.surefire.debug flag.

This will open up port 5005 for remote debugging and you can use your IDE to connect to that port and remote debug the test source (or even Synapse source).