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. To run as a standalone server, simply invoke a command on the downloaded file like so:

The arguments here determine the port, logging level, and a (not-yet-existing) file to store the metadata about the databases that you'll create.

In the output, you'll see that a random accesskey was generated; you will need to provide this accesskey to administer the system. In DovetailDB, you manage the database metadata using script code. You can submit code to run by making HTTP requests to the server. The first thing you'll want to do is create a database. Each database must have its own storage location; here is an example:

The code goes in the "code=" part; there is a variable already defined in the session called "repo", on which you call methods to retrieve and modify the server's metadata.

IMPORTANT: because this database has no registered script code, it will be immedately readable and writable by any other machine. For publicly available boxes, you'll want to call repo.setDbWithCodeFromLocal instead, which atomically creates the database with registered code (which can provide whatever access control mechanism you want).

Now you should be able to make updates to and run queries over your new database named "sandbox". Continue on to the introduction to start using it. (replace "dovetaildb.millstonecw.com" with "localhost" in those examples)