Startup
- BaseX comes with a Graphical User Interface that offers you tools for managing, querying and visualizing your data and writing sophisticated applications in XQuery.
- You can use the standalone Command-Line Interface if you prefer to work in the terminal, or want to do batch processing.
- The Database Server is the right choice if you have multiple users or clients, or if you use other programming languages and if you don’t require HTTP services.
- The HTTP Server provides REST and WebDAV services. With RESTXQ, complex web applications can be built, and the embedded DBA application allows you to work with BaseX in the browser.
- It can also be embedded as a Java library in your applications.
Prerequisites
First, ensure that an up-to-date version of the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) is available:
| BaseX Version | Minimum Java Version |
|---|---|
| 10 | 11 |
| 9 | 8 |
| 8 | 7 |
| older | 6 |
If you have several versions or distributions installed, you can type java -version on the command-line to check which Java version is currently used.
The downloads on https://www.java.com/ are limited to Java 8. If you are looking for a suitable distribution, we recommend the JRE packages from Adoptium.
Next, get a fresh copy of BaseX from our homepage. The following distributions are available:
Core Package
The Core Package is a very compact JAR file. It contains the BaseX database management system, the XQuery processor, the client/server architecture, and the graphical user interface. It runs without additional libraries.
Full Distributions
In addition, the ZIP Package and the Windows Installer contain extra libraries for RESTXQ web applications and other advanced features, Start Scripts, and the DBA, a browser-based database administration interface. If you unzip or install BaseX, the target directory will contain the following directories:
| Directory | Description |
|---|---|
bin |
Start scripts (Windows, Linux). |
data |
The database directory. |
etc |
Example data: XML sample, catalog and DTD files. |
lib |
Extra libraries (Jetty, Tagsoup, …). |
lib/custom |
Directory in which additional JAR files can be placed (such as the Saxon library). |
repo |
Repository for external XQuery modules (the FunctX library is included as example). |
src |
Directory for your XQuery scripts and other source data. |
webapp |
Web Application directory: home of the RESTXQ web application, REST scripts, and DBA. |
The Global Options are stored in the .basex configuration file.
If BaseX is started via the start scripts or the Windows icons, all JAR files in the lib directory and its descendant directories will be added to the class path.
If you work with the ZIP distribution, and if you want to make BaseX globally available, you can add the bin directory to your PATH environment variable.
Web Archive
The WAR Archive can be embedded in existing Java web servers.
Other Distributions
Various other distributions are available from the download page, most of which contain only the core package and, optionally, scripts for starting BaseX.
Concurrent Operations
If you want to perform parallel (concurrent) read and write operations on your databases, you must use the client/server architecture or run BaseX as a web application. You can safely open a database in different JVMs (Java virtual machines) for read-only access, and you will not encounter any problems when reading from and writing to different databases. Update operations from different JVMs to the same database will be rejected or may even lead to corrupt databases.
For example, if you only read data, you can smoothtly launch several variants of BaseX in parallel (the GUI, command-line interface database clients). As soon as you update your data, you should avoid using the GUI or the standalone CLI at the same time.
More details on concurrency can be found on the Transaction Management page.
Changelog
Version 10.0- Updated: Switched to Java 11
- Updated: Switched to Java 8
- Updated: Switched to Java 7
- Updated: BaseXJAXRX has been replaced with BaseXHTTP