howiefh/jar-launcher

Cross-platform native Java launcher

Cross-platform native Java launcher

Native executable launcher, starts JAR applications using relative (to launcher executable) paths to JRE and JAR file. Paths are compiled into launcher. Works on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Note: this is not an executable wrapper, for JAR wrapping you may use launch4j (or others like it) instead

Build prerequisites

To compile launcher you will need:

• bash-like shell
• GNU make
• C99 compiler

On windows you may use msysGit bash as shell and mingw-w64 compiler with patched version of make (description).

To build launcher with paths, specific for your application, you must prepare environment file, example:

export JL_PLATFORM=macosx
export JL_EXECUTABLE_NAME=myapp
export JL_JAVA_RELATIVE_PATH=jre/bin/java
export JL_JAR_RELATIVE_PATH=path/to/myapp.jar

Then run:

. myapp.env
make

Build on windows using custom icon and version info

Icon file path, version information (author, company etc) and manifest file are specified in resources/resources.rc file. To use custom parameters, copy resources.rc to myapp.rc, edit it approproately and set this variable in env file:

export JL_RC_FILE=path/to/myapp.rc

License information

This project is released under the Apache License 2.0

Changelog

2012-12-06

• fix "This program might not have installed correctly" message on windows7, issue1

2012-12-05

• initial public version