[Bitcoin-development] How to create a pull tester JAR

[Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>]

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I just checked in a change to bitcoinj git master that makes it much easier
to create a pull tester jar. Here are instructions for how to do it.

You will need:

   - A Java Development Kit (JDK), version 6 or up should work. As Java 6
   was released eight years ago, this should not be a challenging requirement.
   If you have a Mac just running "java" from the command line should give you
   a GUI prompt to install it automatically. Otherwise apt-get or fetch the
   latest from the interwebs.

   - Apache Maven. This is a rough equivalent of autotools, except it does
   dependency resolution for you. Grab it from
   http://maven.apache.org/download.cgi then unzip it and make sure the bin
   directory is in your PATH. You may need to set the JAVA_HOME environment
   variable if you installed Java to an odd place.

   - git

Make sure you can run "javac" from the command line, then make sure you can
run "mvn", it should complain it can't find a POM (this is a build config
file) and not, say, that it can't find Java.

Now grab bitcoinj from git master:

git clone https://github.com/bitcoinj/bitcoinj.git

... and build ....

cd bitcoinj
mvn -DskipTests package

It will go off and download the libraries needed, compile, and create a
bundled executable JAR called core/target/pull-tests.jar. This is sort of
analogous to static linking in the Java world. It should be fast - expect a
full build plus downloads to take less than a minute. You can use it either
with the QA scripts in the bitcoin core qa/pull-tester directory or just
run things directly:

./bitcoind -regtest -connect=0.0.0.0 -listen -whitelist=127.0.0.1
-datadir=/tmp/pulltester
java -jar core/target/pull-tests.jar

It should go ahead and print lots of debug spew, then at the end say it's
happy.

Let me know if you encounter any problems with this.

Java JARs (which are just zip files renamed) are easily reproduced if you
use the same version of javac and the same bitcoinj version. The ZIP
container has timestamps, but unzipping them and simply diffing the files
between two builds should reveal no differences. I am happy to provide a
pull-tests.jar from my local machine if anyone would like to do this.

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