The Publish Command

The publish command is used to configure, create, update and delete channels on remote transmitters. A virgin transmitter has no channels to transmit. As soon as a channel is created with the publish command then that transmitter can begin transmitting that channel immediately.

The release comes equipped with some premade demo channels, but those channels still need to published on a transmitter. NOTE: do not move these channels into the transmitter directory manually, because that will not work. You must use these channels as the source to publish to that transmitter.


Usage

With no arguments, the publish command fires up a GUI to allow you to change channel publish parameters, and to publish channels that way. This is the recommended way to publish channels, at least the first time you publish a channel, because this is the only way to configure properties of your channel without hand-editing property files.

However, it is possible to perform publish a channel from the command line. That would be the preferred way to automate publising of channels.

Note that on Windows 95 or Windows NT you should run the command-line version of publish from the "Command" subdirectory in your installation directory (typically c:\marimba\"castanet transmitter"\command). The publish command that is at the top-level is designed to be a gui command (so it doesn't pop up a dos shell when double-clicked as an icon) whereas the command version will print to the console window it is run from. Other than that, both versions are identical.

Command Line Arguments

publish [-host host[:port]] [-ignore wildcards] [-quiet] [-n] <dir> ...
This form of the command is used to install or update channel on a remote transmitter. You must specify the directory which contains the channel. If you are installing a channel on a transmitter, then you must specify the host and port for that transmitter. If you are updating a channel, the previous values will be used. You will be prompted for a password if you have never published this channel before. Otherwise it will automatically use the last password you used for this channel.

It is always possible to override the defaults with command line options.

A transmitter must be running in order to create or update channels on it.

-host host[:port]
This specifies the host and port that the transmitter is running on. The default port is 80. NOTE: The default port used to be 5282.
-ignore glob1,glob2,...
This allows you to specify in the form of a shell wildcard the files that should be ignored when creating the channel. E.g., to ignore SCCS directories, files that end with "~", and all Java source files, you would use
	-ignore 'SCCS,*~,*.java'
NOTE: It is necessary to use single-quotes because otherwise the shell might try to expand the file names itself.

If you don't specify the -ignore option then

	-ignore 'core,*~,*.java,*.bak'
is assumed.
-n
The actual changes are listed but not performed.
-quiet
The changes are not listed as they are executed. Normally they are displayed.
Absolute or relative pathnames may be specified. E.g., if you are down in the depths of your channel and you do a publish. it will figure out what channel you are in and publish all the changes for your channel, if any.

The -ignore can be specified each time you publish a channel to change what's ignored.

publish -delete [-host host[:port]] <dir | channel name> ...
This deletes a channel from a transmitter. If you specify a directory of a channel which has been published on a transmitter, then it will delete from the transmitter that you specified the last time you operated on this channel. If you specify a channel name, then it will delete that channel, but you must also specify the host and port of the transmitter. If you don't you will be prompted for the information.

publish
This pops up a GUI that's supposed to make it easier for you to publish one or more channels. There is online help for the GUI version of this command. Just press the Help button whenever you are not sure what to do.