Build instructions for the latest stable version VisualVM 1.3.8. If you want to build different version use links below:

Check out source code with a SVN client using the following command.
svn checkout https://svn.java.net/svn/visualvm~svn/branches/release138

There are two suites:

  • visualvm: which defines the core tool, and
  • plugins: which contains the plugins available in the VisualVM Plugin Center.

The layout in SVN for VisualVM 1.3.8 release is:

  • release138
    • visualvm  <--- core tool suite
    • plugins    <--- for plugin center (jconsole, mbeans, glassfish)

To build the visualvm core tool you need the NetBeans 8.0 platform and profiler binaries available here. These binaries must be extracted into the release138/visualvm directory. You can use ant run or ant build-zip to build or run VisualVM.

To build the plugins suite, use ant build or ant run. This will automatically build the zip distribution of the visualvm core tool into release138/visualvm/dist/visualvm.zip and extract it into the release138/plugins/visualvm directory. After that the build of the plugins suite continues to build each of the individual plugins.