This setup document assumes that you are familiar with the command line interface of your operating system.
If you do not already have a 1.5 Java VM or newer, install one.
Download the DovetailDB package on Google Code. Unpack the .zip or .gz installation to an installation location of your choosing.
Edit the dovetaildb/server.properties file, assigning a path to store the data (<data_dir>) and a port on which to listen (<web_port>). Please ensure <data_dir> exists as an empty directory on your system. On Windows, you'll need to use double-backslashes to seperate the path elements:
dovetaildb.data_dir=C:\\temp\\mydatalocation dovetaildb.web_port=8089
After doing so, you may launch DovetailDB like so:
cd <root of your dovetaildb installation> java -cp .:lib/dovetaildb.jar dovetaildb.Main
On Windows, you'll need to instead use semicolon as the classpath seperator; like this:
cd <root of your dovetaildb installation> java -cp .;lib/dovetaildb.jar dovetaildb.Main
The first time you start DovetailDB, it will initialize the data directory and generate a root accesskey, which you should copy somewhere safe.
You are now ready to use your local DovetailDB instance. Type Ctrl-C to terminate the server.
Where to go from here?