Compile & Run Code

Now that we’ve written our first Java program, we must compile and run the program to see the fruits of our labors. There are many different ways to do this using the Codio platform. We’ll discuss each of them in detail here.

Terminal

Codio includes a built-in Linux terminal, which allows us to perform actions directly on a command-line interface just like we would on an actual computer running Linux. We can access the Terminal in many ways:

1. Selecting the Tools menu, then choosing the Terminal option
2. Pressing SHIFT + ALT + T in any Codio window (you can customize this shortcut in your Codio user preferences)
3. Pressing the Open Terminal icon in the file tree
4. Selecting the Open Terminal option from the Run menu (it is the first menu to the right of the Help menu)

Additionally, some pages may already open a terminal window for us in the left-hand pane, as this page so helpfully does. As we can see, we’re never very far away from a terminal.

Let’s go to the terminal window and navigate to our program. When we first open the Terminal window, it should show us a prompt that looks somewhat like this one:

There is quite a bit of information there, but we’re interested in the last little bit of the last line, where it says ~/workspace. That is the current directory, or folder, our terminal is looking at, also known as our working directory. We can always find the full location of our working directory by typing the pwd command, short for “Print Working Directory,” in the terminal. Let’s try it now!

Enter this command in the terminal:

and we should see output similar to this:

In that output, we’ll see that the full path to our working directory is /home/codio/workspace. This is the default location for all of our content in Codio, and its where everything shown in the file tree to the far left is stored. When working in Codio, we’ll always want to store our work in this directory.

Next, let’s use the ls command, short for “LiSt,” to see a list of all of the items in that directory:

We should see a whole list of items appear in the terminal. Most of them are directories containing examples for the chapters this textbook, including the HelloWorld.java file that we edited in the last page. Thankfully, the directories are named in a very logical way, making it easy for us to find what we need. For example, to find the directory for Chapter 1 that contains examples for Java, look for the directory with the name starting with 1j. In this case, it would be 1j-hello.

Finally, we can use the cd command, short for “Change Directory,” to change the working directory. To change to the 1j-hello directory, type cd into the terminal window, followed by the name of that directory:

We are now in the 1j-hello directory, as we can see by observing the ~/workspace/1j-hello on the current line in the terminal. Finally, we can do the ls command again to see the files in that directory:

We should see our HelloWorld.java file! If it doesn’t appear, try using this command to get to the correct directory: cd /home/codio/workspace/1j-hello.

Once we’re at the point where we can see the HelloWorld.java file, we can move on to actually compiling and running the program.

Compiling in Terminal

To compile a Java program in the terminal, we’ll use the javac command, short for Java Compiler, followed by the name of the Java file we’d like to compile. So, in our case, we’ll do the following:

If it works correctly, we shouldn’t get any additional output. The compiler will look through our Java file and create a new file containing the Java bytecode for our program, called HelloWorld.class. We can use the ls command to see it:

Running in Terminal

Finally, we can now run our program! Once it is compiled, just type the following in the terminal to run it:

That’s all there is to it! We’ve now successfully compiled and run our first Java program. Of course, we can run the program as many times as we want by repeating the previous java command. If we make changes to the HelloWorld.java file, we’ll need to recompile it using the previous javac command first. Then, if those changes instruct the computer to do something different, we should see those changes when we run the program after compiling it.

Run Menu

In many of the Codio projects and tutorials in this course, the Run Menu will be populated with helpful commands. The Run Menu can be found at the top of the screen, right here:

Each Codio project or tutorial may have different items in this menu, since they can be configured by the author of the project. For this book, there will always be the following options:

• Java - Compile File
• Java - Run File

To use these commands, we must simply open up the file we’d like to use, then select the appropriate option from the Run Menu. It will automatically use the currently open file in the command.

So, to compile and run our file, we must simply open HelloWorld.java in the panel to the left, then click the arrow in the Run Menu and first select Java - Compile File. It should open up a Terminal tab and show output similar to the following:

It looks very similar to the command we entered manually. The only difference is that it uses the folder name along with the filename in the command, which ensures that it gets the correct file without even opening that directory.

Once we’ve compiled the file, we can go back to that tab and select the Java - Run File option. It should show output similar to this:

Again, it looks very similar to the commands we performed earlier. Since the Java bytecode file is in a directory, we have to use a -classpath option to let Java know where to find the file.

Codio Assessments

Last, but not least, many of the Codio tutorials and projects in this program will include assessments that we must solve by writing code. Codio can then automatically run the program and check for specific things, such as the correct output, in order to give us a grade. For most of these questions, we’ll be able to make changes to our code as many times as we’d like to get the correct answer. Try the example below!

{Check It!|assessment}(code-output-compare-146573703)

As we can see, there are many different ways to compile and run our code using Codio. Feel free to use any of these methods throughout this course.