Command-line and other tools for Jena developers

Jena includes various command-line utilities which can help you with a variety of tasks in developing Jena-based applications.

Index of tools

Setting up your Environment

An environment variable JENAROOT is used by all the command line tools to configure the class path automatically for you. You can set this up as follows:

On Linux / Mac

export JENAROOT=the directory you downloaded Jena to
export PATH=$PATH:$JENAROOT/bin

On Windows

SET JENAROOT=the directory you downloaded Jena to
SET PATH=%PATH%;%JENAROOT%\bat

Running the Tools

Once you've done the above you should now be able to run the tools from the command line like so:

On Linux / Mac

sparql --version

On Windows

sparql.bat --version

This command will simply print the versions of Jena and ARQ used in your distribution, all the tools support the --version option. To find out how to use a specific tool add the --help flag instead.

Note that many examples of using Jena tools typically use the Linux style invocation because most of the Jena developers work on Linux/Mac platforms. When running on windows simply add .bat as an extension to the name of the command line tool to run it, on some versions of Windows this may not be required.

Common Issues with Running the Tools

If you receive errors stating that a class is not found then it is most likely that JENAROOT is not set correctly. As a quick sanity check you can try the following to see if it is set appropriately:

On Linux / Mac

cd $JENAROOT

On Windows

cd %JENAROOT%

If this command fails then JENAROOT is not correctly set, please ensure you have set it correctly and try again.

Windows users may experience problems if trying to run the tools when their JENAROOT path contains spaces in it, there are two workarounds for this:

Move your Jena install to a path without spaces
Grab the latest scripts from Trunk where they have been fixed to safely handle this. Future releases will include this fix and resolve this issue