Command line usage

Using jardiff is relatively simple, I suggest just grabbing the jardiff-0.1-uber.jar, as this is executable from the command line, and includes all the dependencies.

If you ever need to list the options that jardiff understands

This lists all the options as follows:

usage: JarDiff -f <from jar> -t <to jar> [-F <from name>] [-T <to name>]
               [[-o <xml|html|xhtml|text>]|[-x <xsl file>]] [-O <file>]
               [-s <href>] [-fa <href>] [-ta <href>]

 -o,--output-format    output format, xml or html
 -F,--from-name        from name
 -T,--to-name          to name
 -O,--out              output file
 -f,--from             from jar file
 -h,--help             print help on command line arguments
 -t,--to               to jar file
 -x,--xsl              custom xsl sheet to format output with
 -fa,--from-api        relative location of from api
 -ta,--to-api          relative location of to api
 -s,--stylesheet       stylesheet to link to when generating html
      

For instance, the following would be a typical invocation:

This will print out in text the public API changes between jardiff-0.1.jar and jardiff-0.2.jar

Another typical invocation would be to write a html report on the differences between two versions of a project, for example:

This will write a file called "diff-0.1-0.2.html" in the current directory.

If you want to read the raw xml report. (Jardiff uses xml for it's own internal format, and uses built in stylesheets to convert output to text, html and xhtml) you would use -o xml.

If you're brave enough to build your own style sheet for jardiff. (It's probably a good idea to use one of the built in stylesheets and build upon it if you want to do this, the built in xml format is not that easy to deal with), you would specify -x mystylesheet.xsl.

The stylesheet argument specifies a relative href to a stylesheet to be used, this is used instead of the generated style information.

The from-api and to-api arguments specify hrefs to the api docs for the from api, and api docs for the to api.

An example of command line execute is included in the distribution in the src/examples directory.