These installation instructions have changed as of release 12.7. See Installing (Pre-12.7) for the instructions for earlier releases.

There are two different methods for installing Cougaar: downloading zip files (containing jars) or cloning from repositories. For users not planning to modify the Cougaar code itself, and instead are planning to just execute it and/or develop applications using it, zip files are the recommended approach. For users planning to modify the Cougaar source code to meet their needs, cloning repositories is the recommended approach (since this allows easier merging with future code changes and submission of patches for possible inclusion in the official code base).

Both installation methods start with the same preliminary steps:

1. Ensure that Java 1.6 is installed and on the system path. To download the JDK, visit http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index.html.  No special operating system or hardware is required. Cougaar developers use a variety of operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX. SMP and HyperThreading are fully supported.
2. Create a Cougaar directory, e.g. “C:\Cougaar”.
3. Optionally create a separate applications directory, e.g. C:\CougaarApps”. If it is easier, applications can live in the same top-level directory as the internal Cougaar code, but need not.

When installing from zips, do the following:

1. Download the files cougaar.zip and tutorials.zip. (The file cougaar-api.zip contains the Javadoc and is optional.)
2. Extract cougaar.zip into the Cougaar directory.
3. Extract tutorials.zip into either the Cougaar directory or the applications directory.

Reminder: The zip file jars do not include the Cougaar source code.  If you want to look at the Cougaar source code, you need to use another method of downloading and installing it, as also described here.  If you are doing Cougaar application development, you should have source-code completion in Eclipse with just these zip file jars.

For reference, the connection between a jar and its sources and/or javadoc is kept in the project’s .classpath file.  It can be configured in several ways, but the easiest is probably via Build Path-->Configure Build Path on the right-click menu of any Java project, package or file.  The ‘Libraries’ tab of this dialog will show the jar dependencies.  Each of these can be expanded to show/edit the source attachment, the javadoc attachment,  the native library location and the access rules.

When installing from the repositories, do the following (though see the shortcut in the next section):

1. For each of the repositories that is part of the current release (see here), do
   git clone http://cougaar.org/git/<repoName>.git
   (Alternatively, use the “Import…” function in Eclipse to use Eclipse to do the clone.)
2. If there is a team doing development, then it is recommended that there be a shared local repository and that all developers pull from this shared repository and push back to it.

For a shortcut for installing from repositories, do the following:

1. In Eclipse, use the Import->Team->Team Project Set with the file CougaarOrgProjectSet.psf. This automatically imports all the required projects.  The Juno version of Eclipse includes sufficient Git support for this feature.

[For additional details on the contents, see the Release Contents.]

The next step is to test the installation by running one or more of the sample applications. Instructions for how to run Cougaar are given here, while a set of sample applications supplied with the release are described here.