Developers

Standards used for module making

Developer's Quick Start

If this is your first time getting involved with the SWORD Project, welcome! The SWORD Project needs talented, highly motivated, and committed individuals. Volunteers like you keep this project going. Thank you for your willingness to help. To find where you fit it, here are a few simple steps to follow:

  1. Get our code (see below)
  2. Explore the Developers' Wiki of our site and see what info is available. Also, if you have not done so already, go to the Software Section and try out some of our software to see what others are already doing; maybe there is a specific area where you feel called to contribute. Alternatively, you may feel you have an idea for a domain into which we have not yet ventured.
  3. Once you have a general idea of where you would like to help, the best place to start is by subscribing to the developers' mailing list from its webpage, http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel. There are also mailing list archives available at http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/sword-devel.
  4. Jump right in! Post to the list with how you think you can help out and see what feedback you get!

The SWORD Engine

The SWORD Engine is a software framework that allows research manipulation of Biblical texts. There are a number of projects that use The SWORD Engine, including Bibletime, Xiphos, PocketSword and many others. Many of these projects already include The SWORD Engine in their distribution, so only download if you were instructed to do so, or are a software developer wishing to develop Bible software.

Download Release Tarball

Current Version: SWORD Engine / API v1.9.0 ( Wed Nov 04 19:41:03 EST 2020 )
Previous Versions: View Archives

Then:
$ tar xzfv sword-1.9.0.tar.gz
$ cd sword*

OR Checkout Latest Code from SVN

Grab out bleeding edge as-of-yet-unreleased code from SVN:

Obtain sword from SVN
$ svn co https://crosswire.org/svn/sword/trunk/ sword

Then:
$ cd sword
$ ./autogen.sh

A quick start for getting the engine compiled:

See the README and INSTALL files included in the source distribution for help with compiling and installation.

Then:
$ ./usrinst.sh
$ make
$ su
# make install
# make install_config
# exit
$

The SWORD engine should now be installed. You should be able to download any books from our site (http://www.crosswire.org/sword/modules/ Choose the RawZip download link for each book) that you wish to make available and unzip them to /usr/share/sword.