Opening and Running Orekit 11.3.2 on Windows 11

A bit embarrassingly, I am having a hell of a time actually opening and running Orekit. I’ll begin by mentioning I am unexperienced with JAR files, but I have run through a number of internet tutorials at this point without success. By now I have:

  • Downloaded Orekit 11.3.2 Binaries
  • Downloaded JRE
  • Downloaded jarfix
  • Unchecked “Hide extensions for known file types”
  • Ran via double click
  • Ran via Java™ Platform SE binary
  • Ran manually through command prompt

Running the Orekit JAR through the command prompt returns the following “no main manifest attribute, in Orekit-11.3.2.jar”, but I am not sure how I can proceed without messing with the source code.

If you have any solutions of have been hung up similarly let me know. Would be happy to clarify anything else if need be, thanks in advance.

Hi @jmckinley0321 welcome,

The behavior you see is normal: there are no main method in Orekit, so it is normal running the jar does not work.

Orekit is not a standalone application, it is a library. It is intended to be called by some upper level application someone develops on top of Orekit.

There are several tutorials that present different features of the library, but they are also not organized as a single jar with say a graphical user interface which would have a main entry point. They are separate programs, each with its own main. They are basically run individually from an IDE like Eclipse, Netbeans or Idea, as they are inteded to demonstrate how to build applications on top of Orekit.

Very late to respond, but thanks for the explanation. I understand quite a bit more now and have successfully gotten opened an environment with Orekit in PyCharm using the Python wrapper. I will have many more questions as I begin to explore its functionality in coming days!