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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-22T11:50:30+00:00

What’s the best option for packaging and distributing a command line application written in

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What’s the best option for packaging and distributing a command line application written in Java, targetting OS/X and Unix?

The executable jar option seems fairly robust, and my distribution doesn’t need to be super fancy, so right now I’m just thinking of plonking a bash script next to that with the relevant java invocation and being done with it.

I’m wondering if there’s something similar to python’s bdist package that would let me easily make nice installers for both target platforms. Or if there’s some more obvious way that I’m missing where I can turn the entire distribution in to a executable file that wraps the jar in some way.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Since you are providing a CLI application it may be easiest to just provide the script you already mentioned. I usually try to keep it self-contained, e. g. not referencing external paths / using only relative paths etc. And maybe a readme.txt file.

    If you would like to provide a full-blown installer, you might want to take a look at IzPack, a tool for generating installers for Java deliverables. It also allows the wizard to run in console mode, if you do not have a graphical environment available for installation (see the “Features” page in the link above).

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