exe4j's command line compiler exe4jc.exe can be found in the bin directory of your exe4j installation. It operates on any config file with extension .exe4j that has been produced with the exe4j wizard. (exe4j.exe). The exe4j command line compiler is invoked as follows:

exe4jc [OPTIONS] [config file]

A quick help for all options is printed to the terminal when invoking

exe4jc --help

A typical run of the exe4j command line compiler looks like this:

exe4j version X.Y, built on 20YY-MM-DD
Unregistered evaluation version

Loading config file myapp.exe4j
Deleting temporary directory
Compiled executable for myapp in 0.8 seconds.

Command line compiler options

The exe4j command line compiler has the following options:

• -h or --help

  Displays a quick help for all available options.

• -V or --version

  Displays the version of exe4j in the following format:

  exe4j version 1.0, built on 2002-10-05

• -v or --verbose

  Enables verbose mode. In verbose mode, exe4j prints out information about internal processes. If you experience problems with exe4j, please make sure to include the verbose terminal output with your bug report.

• -q or --quiet

  Enables quiet mode. In quiet mode, no terminal output short of a fatal error will be printed.

• -t or --test

  Enables test mode. In test mode, no executable will be generated in the directory for the executable.

• -w or --fail-on-warning

  If a warning is printed and this option is specified, the build will fail at the end. It does not fail immediately, so you can see all warnings and fix them all at once. The exit code in this case is 2 instead of 1 for an actual error and 0 for a successful execution.

• -L or --license=KEY

  Update the license key on the command line. This is useful if you have installed exe4j on a headless system and cannot start the GUI. KEY must be replaced with your license key.

• -x or --require-license

  By default, exe4j will fallback to evaluation mode if the license key is not valid. If you want the compilation to fail instead, you can specify this option.

• -r STRING or --release=STRING

  override the application version defined in the "Executable info->Version info" step. STRING must be replaced with the desired version number. The version number can only contain numbers and dots.

• -d STRING or --destination=STRING

  override the destination directory for the executable. STRING must be replaced with the desired directory. If the directory contains spaces, you must enclose STRING in quotation marks.

  Note that this option does not affect the interpretation of relative paths defined by the distribution source directory and the output directory as specified in the "Application info" step of the exe4j wizard.

Overriding settings at build time

In order to facilitate the use of exe4j in automated build processes, the destination directory for the executable and the version text line of the splash screen can be overridden with command line options. Because the file format of exe4j's config files is in XML format, you can achieve arbitrary customizations by replacing tokens or by applying XSLT stylesheets to the config file.

Relative resource paths

If you would like to use relative paths for the distribution directory, the bitmap and icon files (e.g. for automated build processes in distributed environments) you can change these values manually in the config file.

If the mentioned paths are relative, they are interpreted relative to the location of the config file.