KNIME Analytics Platform is the leading open solution for data-driven innovation, helping you discover the potential hidden in your data, mine for fresh insights, or predict new futures. Our enterprise-grade, open source platform is fast to deploy, easy to scale, and intuitive to learn.
The tools provided in this repository will help you set up your KNIME Analytics Platform SDK in order to work with the source code of our plug-ins or develop new extensions for KNIME Analytics Platform. If you are not interested in development and prefer to simply download and try KNIME Analytics Platform right now, then click here.
Please note: We are currently in the process of publishing more of our open-source projects on Bitbucket and GitHub. Stay tuned!
KNIME Analytics Platform is built on Eclipse, employing its wealth of functionality in a variety of ways. A key concept behind Eclipse is its use of plug-ins, which can be added to an existing installation to provide additional functionality. In order to develop custom functionality to extend KNIME Analytics Platform, you first have to populate your local target platform with all the required dependencies. A target platform defines a set of plug-ins that can be used as dependencies by projects in your workspace. A pre-configured target platform definition that
contains a minimum set of plug-ins can be found in the file KNIME.target in the project org.knime.sdk.setup.
The target platform is different for every release, therefore you must check out the correct branch of org.knime.sdk.setup. E.g. for developing
nodes that are compatible with the 3.2 release, check out branch releases/3.2and use its KNIME.target file. If you want to develop against the current master code, check out the master branch of this repository. However, bear in mind that extensions developed against master may not work in
release installations due to changed and/or missing API.
Some projects auto-generate code using XML Beans. Therefore you must have the project org.apache.xmlbeans from this repository in your workspace.
We use Git LFS, therefore you must have the corresponding program installed and enabled on your system in order to properly clone our repositories.
- Adding Plug-ins From KNIME Analytics Platform Update Site: You can simply edit the existing update-site entry in the selected target definition and add more extensions as needed.
- Third Party Update-Sites: If you need additional plug-ins from third party update-sites, you can edit the software sites in the target definitions. For example you can add the update-sites from Community Contributions Website.
- Download and install Eclipse 4.6.1. Make sure you are using version 4.6.1 and not 4.6.2 because the latter contains a bug in the Java compiler, which makes it impossible to compile some KNIME classes.
- Install the Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment plug-in from The Eclipse Project Updates update-site
- Clone this repository
- Import all projects
(File -> Import -> General -> Existing Projects)from this repository into your workspace - Double-click the target platform definition file
KNIME.target, which you will find in theorg.knime.sdk.setupproject. - Now wait until Eclipse has resolved the target platform and then click Set as Target Platform (upper-right corner)
- The
KNIME Analytics Platformlaunch configuration is now available to you in the debug and run configuration dialogs as Eclipse application. The run configuration starts a new KNIME instance with all KNIME Analytics Platform Extensions in the target platform and your local workspace. This launched instance can be used for debugging and testing your custom functionality. All of the plug-ins available in your workspace take precedence over the plug-ins in the target platform. - The launch configuration uses 2GB of available RAM. If you want to use a different amount, change the value of the
-Xmx2gVM argument in the Arguments tab of the launch configuration.
While the target platform definitions enable you to install all KNIME Analytics Platform Extensions directly into your Eclipse, you may want to inspect the code of certain plug-ins in more detail. Simply clone the extension of interest from one of our git repositories and import the plug-ins as Java projects into your Eclipse workspace (File -> Import -> General -> Existing Projects). Note that, as already mentioned, projects in the workspace take precedence over plug-ins in the target platform.
- Eclipse might show an error "No API Baseline set". You can safely set the error level at
Window -> Preferences -> Plug-in Development -> API Baselinesto ignore. - Use
git lfs clonein favor ofgit cloneto clone our repositories for faster cloning. - In case you experience compile errors such as
The type org.dmg.pmml.* cannot be resolvedorThe import org.dmg.pmml.* cannot be resolvedplease close or remove the projectorg.knime.core.pmml. This project contains auto-generated classes only and is already part of the target platform.
Nightly Builds are available here; the relevant forum section can be found here.
Do you have questions regarding the development of KNIME Analytics Platform? Reach out to us in our Forum.
If you have developed an extension of general interest and you want to make it available to the KNIME Community, we are happy to support you! Contact us via our Community Contributions Website.
Currently we can't accept external pull requests for various reasons. However, we plan to allow external developers to contribute directly to KNIME Analytics Platform in the future.