Rhino is an implementation of JavaScript in Java.
Rhino is licensed under the MPL 2.0.
The current release is Rhino 1.7.15. Please see the Release Notes.
Releases
Rhino 1.7.15 | May 3, 2024 |
Rhino 1.7.14 | January 6, 2022 |
Rhino 1.7.13 | September 2, 2020 |
Rhino 1.7.12 | January 13, 2020 |
Rhino 1.7.11 | May 30, 2019 |
Rhino 1.7.10 | April 9, 2018 |
Rhino 1.7.9 | March 15, 2018 |
Rhino 1.7.8 | January 22, 2018 |
Rhino 1.7.7.2 | August 24, 2017 |
Rhino 1.7.7.1 | February 2, 2016 |
Rhino 1.7.7 | June 17, 2015 |
Rhino 1.7.6 | April 15, 2015 |
Rhino 1.7R5 | January 29, 2015 |
Compatibility table which shows which advanced JavaScript features from ES6, and ES2016+ are implemented in Rhino.
Information for script builders and embedders:
JavaDoc for all the APIs:
https://javadoc.io/doc/org.mozilla/rhino
Rhino 1.7.15 and before were primarily used in a single JAR called "rhino.jar".
Newer releases now organize the code using Java modules. There are four primary modules:
- rhino: The primary codebase necessary and sufficient to run JavaScript code. Required by everything that uses Rhino. In releases after 1.7.15, this module does not contain the "tools" or the XML implementation.
- rhino-tools: Contains the shell, debugger, and the "Global" object, which many tests and other Rhino-based tools use. Note that adding Global gives Rhino the ability to print to stdout, open files, and do other things that may be considered dangerous in a sensitive environment, so it only makes sense to include if you will use it.
- rhino-xml: Adds the implementation of the E4X XML standard. Only required if you are using that.
- rhino-engine: Adds the Rhino implementation of the standard Java ScriptEngine interface. Some projects use this to be able to switch between script execution engines, but for anything even moderately complex it is almost always easier and always more flexible to use Rhino's API directly.
The release contains the following other modules, which are used while building and testing but which are not published to Maven Central:
- rhino-all: This creates an "all-in-one" JAR that includes rhino-runtime, rhino-tools, and rhino-xml. This is what's used if you want to run Rhino using "java jar".
- tests: The tests that depend on all of Rhino and also the external tests, including the Mozilla legacy test scripts and the test262 tests.
- benchmarks: Runs benchmarks using JMH.
- examples: Surprisingly, this contains example code.
Rhino requires Java 11 to build. It will (currently) build with Java versions up to at least Java 21. However, not all tools work with Java 21, such as "spotless", so Java 11 is required for regular developers.
For normal development, you can build the code, run the static checks, and run all the tests like this:
git submodule init
git submodule update
./gradlew check
To just run the Rhino shell, you can do this from the top-level directory:
./gradlew run -q --console=plain
Alternately, you can build an all-in-one JAR and run that:
./gradlew :rhino-all:build
java -jar rhino-all/build/libs/rhino-all-1.7.16-SNAPSHOT.jar
You can also run the benchmarks:
./gradlew jmh
The "Jacoco" coverage is enabled by default for the main published modules as well as the special "tests" module. Coverage is generated for each of the main projects separately and available by running
./gradlew jacocoTestReport
To see an aggregated coverage report for everything, which is probably what you want, run
./gradlew testCodeCoverageReport
The result is in: ./tests/build/reports/jacoco/testCodeCoverageReport/html
- Ensure all tests are passing
- Remove
-SNAPSHOT
from version ingradle.properties
in project root folder - Create file
gradle.properties
in$HOME/.gradle
folder with following properties. Populate them with maven repo credentials and repo location.
mavenUser=
mavenPassword=
mavenSnapshotRepo=
mavenReleaseRepo=
- Run
Gradle
task to publish artifacts to Maven Central.
./gradlew publish
- Increase version and add
-SNAPSHOT
to it ingradle.properties
in project root folder. - Push
gradle.properties
toGitHub
If you are using a modular JDK that disallows the reflective access to
non-public fields (16 and later), you may need to configure the JVM with the
--add-opens
option to authorize the packages that your scripts shall use, for example:
--add-opens java.desktop/javax.swing.table=ALL-UNNAMED
This is not necessary just to build Rhino -- it may be necessary when embedding it depending on what your project does.
Most issues are managed on GitHub:
https://github.com/mozilla/rhino/issues
To submit a new PR, please use the following process:
- Ensure that your entire build passes "./gradlew check". This will include code formatting and style checks and runs the tests.
- Please write tests for what you fixed, unless you can show us that existing tests cover the changes. Use existing tests, such as those in "testsrc/org/mozilla/javascript/tests", as a guide.
- If you fixed ECMAScript spec compatibility, take a look at test262.properties and see if you can un-disable some tests.
- Push your change to GitHub and open a pull request.
- Please be patient as Rhino is only maintained by volunteers and we may need some time to get back to you.
- Thank you for contributing!
Code formatting was introduced in 2021. The "spotless" plugin will fail your build if you have changed any files that have not yet been reformatted. Please use "spotlessApply" to reformat the necessary files.
If you are the first person to touch a big file that spotless wants to make hundreds of lines of changes to, please try to put the reformatting changes alone into a single Git commit so that we can separate reformatting changes from more substantive changes.
Currently, you must be building on Java 11 for Spotless to run. We recommend that you have that ready. (We have not been able to figure out a version of Spotless and the Google formatting plugin that it uses that works on many Java versions.)
GitHub is the best place to go with questions. For example, we use "GitHub discussions":