HowTo: Build your very own PDI (aka Kettle) version from SVN

I've been using PDI (aka Kettle) for years now and as the Pentaho company does not release all bugfix release as package I build my own packages on a regular basis.

This is how it's done:
Step one - get the sourcecode
~/Source$ svn co http://source.pentaho.org/svnkettleroot/Kettle/branches/3.2.4
(You need to choose the version of the branch wisely. Don't take the one with the highest number - it's usually still in development and is likely to break.)

Step two - create the zip
cd 3.2.4/
ant zip
You should get something like this as a result:
BUILD SUCCESSFUL
Total time: 1 minute 36 seconds
(On a system with an old ant version I got errors about a condition. I had to remove this section from build.xml:
                [condition property="revision" value="${svn-revision}" else="1"]
                        [length string="${svn-revision}" length="7" when="less"]
                [/length][/condition]
and change the exec above from:
outputproperty="svn-revision"
to:
outputproperty="revision"
)

Step three - unzip
Now we have a zip file lying around. We can deploy this baby now or better yet give it a test run on our build machine.
mkdir released
cd released/
unzip ../pdi-ce-3.2.4-r12038.zip
Step four - run
That should be it. Try to run it:
sh ./spoon.sh
Don't worry about a black splash screen. This is something about GTK changing some API stuff. You will have to set an environment variable for the time being:
export GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true
Now... have fun keeping up with all the updates the fine people at Pentaho are creating.

This article was updated on 18 März 2010