 Apache Jena CLI tools setup

 New to topics? Read the documentation here!

 Top articles  Latest articles + New article in topic

Ciro Santilli 34  Updated 2024-12-15  +Created 1970-01-01

The CLI tools don't appear to be packaged for Ubuntu 23.10? Annoying... There is a package libapache-jena-java but it doesn't contain any binaries, only Java library files.

To run the CLI tools easily we can download the prebuilt:

sudo apt install openjdk-22-jre
wget https://dlcdn.apache.org/jena/binaries/apache-jena-4.10.0.zip
unzip apache-jena-4.10.0.zip
cd apache-jena-4.10.0
export JENA_HOME="$(pwd)"
export PATH="$PATH:$(pwd)/bin"

and we can confirm it works with:

sparql -version

which outputs:

Apache Jena version 4.10.0

If your Java is too old then then running sparql with the prebuilts fails with:

Error: A JNI error has occurred, please check your installation and try again
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: arq/sparql has been compiled by a more recent version of the Java Runtime (class file version 55.0), this version of the Java Runtime only recognizes class file versions up to 52.0
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:756)
        at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:473)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:74)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:369)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:363)
        at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
        at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:362)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:418)
        at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:352)
        at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:351)
        at sun.launcher.LauncherHelper.checkAndLoadMain(LauncherHelper.java:621)

Build from source is likely something like:

sudo apt install maven openjdk-22-jdk
git clone https://github.com/apache/jena --branch jena-4.10.0 --depth 1
cd jena
mvn clean install

TODO test it.

If you make the mistake of trying to run the source tree without build:

git clone https://github.com/apache/jena --branch jena-4.10.0 --depth 1
cd jena
export JENA_HOME="$(pwd)"
export PATH="$PATH:$(pwd)/apache-jena/bin"

it fails with:

Error: Could not find or load main class arq.sparql

as per: users.jena.apache.narkive.com/T5TaEszT/sparql-tutorial-querying-datasets-error-unrecognized-option-graph

 Read the full article