I suspect this is not as hard as I’m making it but I’m having trouble understanding how to build other people’s source into jar files I can use for my own projects.
For example(please make the answer general so I can apply it to other sources), I’m looking at https://github.com/xetorthio/jedis and the source seems newer than the provided jars(for which I noticed a few bugs), so I wanted to try to build it so its like the provided jars(this way I can test it in my project). I know how to clone the repository but I don’t feel like copying/pasting or import one file at a time into eclipse to export a jar.
Is there something easy that I can go into a folder and run a command to get the jar(my understanding jar’s are just zipped files)?
Each project will provide its own way of building and packaging. There are some standard methods. The project you linked to is using a tool called Gradle.
Try running
gradlewto see if that will build the project for you. If that fails, you could learn to use Gradle. Alternatively you could contact the project owner and ask for a new release.