JHOVE Distribution

The latest version of JHOVE can be downloaded from GitHub here. A full history of JHOVE releases is also available from the GitHub downloads page.

1 Requirements

  1. Java J2SE 1.4
    (JHOVE was originally implemented using the SUN J2SE SDK 1.4.1, but has also been tested to run properly under Sun J2SE SDK 5.)

  2. To recompile the JHOVE source code, Apache Ant is required.
    Note that the JAVA_HOME environment variable must be appropriately assigned for Ant to function properly.
    (JHOVE was implemented and tested using ANT 1.5.1.)

JHOVE should be usable on any Unix, Windows, or OS X platform with the appropriate J2SE installation.

2 Distribution

JHOVE is distributed as GZIP’ed TAR and ZIP files under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL).

3 Third-party modules

Modules for additional file formats have been written by authors outside of the Harvard University Library (HUL). These are available for downloading. Please note that these modules are not supported by HUL.

4 Installation

The files of the standard HUL-supported distribution packages can be unpacked by:

gunzip jhove-1_1.tar.gz
tar xvf jhove-1_1.tar

gunzip jhove-examples.tar.gz
tar xvf jhove-examples.tar

or

unzip jhove-1_1.zip
unzip jhove-example.zip

This will produce the following directory structure:

jhove/
  COPYING                          # GNU Lesser General Public License
  LICENSE                          # JHOVE license information
  README
  RELEASENOTES                     # JHOVE release notes
  ...

4.1 Directory Structure

Refer to the directory structure above.

4.2 Installation

After unpacking the distribution, edit the configuration file jhove/conf/jhove.conf and set the <jhoveHome> element to the absolute pathname of the JHOVE installation directory and the temporary directory:

<jhoveHome>jhove-installation-directory</jhoveHome>
<tempDirectory>temporary-directory</tempDirectory>

For example, on a Unix system:

<jhoveHome>/users/sampleuser/projects/jhove</jhoveHome>
<tempDirectory>/var/tmp</tempDirectory>

Edit the JHOVE Bourne shell driver script jhove to set the JHOVE home directory, Java home directory, and Java interpreter:

JHOVE_HOME=/<jhove-home-directory>
JAVA_HOME=/<java-home-directory>
JAVA=$JAVA_HOME/bin/java

For Windows systems, edit the DOS shell driver script jhove.bat:

SET JHOVE_HOME=<jhove-home-directory>
SET JAVA_HOME=<java-home-directory>
SET JAVA=%JAVA_HOME%\bin\java

4.3 Configuring JHOVE

JHOVE uses an XML-formatted configuration file. Refer to the documentation for details.

4.4 Testing

Invoke JHOVE on the example file control.txt:

jhove -c conf/jhove.conf -k examples/ascii/control.txt

This should generate output similar to:

Jhove (Rel. 1.0, 2005-05-26)
 Date: 2005-05-12 10:20:43 EDT
 RepresentationInformation: examples/ascii/control.txt
  ReportingModule: ASCII-hul, Rel. 1.1 (2005-01-11)
  ...