The official and active project home for BeanShell.

The only recommended version is a manual build of the master branch. Support for legacy releases reached end-of-life; only issues and pull requests against master will be accepted.

The next release will be BeanShell 3.0, as the development roadmap outlines. It was decided that the next release would be a production-ready major version with all outstanding issues resolved to encourage community involvement and testing.

Most of the outstanding issues were imported from Sourceforge, where they were reported many years ago and are now orphaned without owners. The majority has already been resolved on master. An earnest call goes out for assistance in processing these issues to verify whether they are still valid, reproducible, or already resolved.

New language enhancements remain open for comments and discussion.

Items identified as out of scope for 3.0 are scheduled for the next release.

• StrictJava compliance, unit tests, and outstanding issues
• Updated documentation. The discussions double as future documentation.

BeanShell is a small, free, embeddable Java source interpreter written in Java with object scripting language features. BeanShell executes standard Java syntax dynamically and extends it with common scripting conveniences such as loose types, commands, and method closures like those in Perl and JavaScript.

You can use BeanShell interactively for Java experimentation and debugging as well as to extend your applications in new ways. Scripting Java lends itself to various applications, including rapid prototyping, user scripting extension, rules engines, configuration, testing, dynamic deployment, embedded systems, and Java education.

BeanShell is small and embeddable, so you can call BeanShell from your Java applications to execute Java code dynamically at run-time or to provide extensibility in your applications. Alternatively, you can use standalone BeanShell scripts to work with Java objects and APIs to manipulate Java applications dynamically. Since BeanShell is written in Java and runs in the same VM as your application, you can freely pass references to "live" objects into scripts and return them as results.

Starting with version 2.0b5, BeanShell is licensed under the Apache License, version 2.0. See LICENSE for details and the NOTICE file for required attributions.

The development branch is the master, and it is currently recommended that you use that version. To build, pull the project, and run the maven command.

$ mvn install

BeanShell requires at least JDK 8 but will also work with LTS versions; Java 11, Java 17, and Java 21.

The source code releases can be downloaded from GitHub releases

Latest release: not supported (use the recommended development snapshot)

• BeanShell 2.1.1 - bsh-2.1.1-src.zip

Beanshell 3.0.0 currently only has a SNAPSHOT release published to Sonatype. To use Beanshell with Maven, add this to your pom.xml:

    <dependencies>
       <dependency>
         <groupId>org.beanshell</groupId>
         <artifactId>bsh</artifactId>
         <version>3.0.0-SNAPSHOT</version>
       </dependency>
    </dependencies>

You can also download the bsh.jar binary from the releases page or the link below:

• bsh-2.1.1.jar

If you want to execute the Beanshell User Interface, either double-click the JAR file, or run it with:

$ java -jar bsh-2.1.1.jar

For a BeanShell interactive shell, you can either use the java command:

$ java -cp bsh-2.1.1.jar bsh.Interpreter

or the supplied helper scripts bsh or bsh.bat, available under the scripts folder.

You will need Java 5 or later installed.

$ mvn clean install

You are encouraged to raise a Github Pull Request with any suggested improvements and fixes!

You can also raise an issue for any questions or bugs. Remember, your stack trace might be particularly useful for others!

Please note only issues and pull requests made against the master branch will be considered.

For full documentation, see the BeanShell wiki and the FAQ for frequently asked questions.

The old documentation available at http://beanshell.org may also be useful.

• Dynamic execution of the entire Java syntax, Java code fragments, loosely typed Java, and additional scripting conveniences.
• Transparent access to all Java objects and APIs.
• Runs in four modes: Command Line, Console, Applet, and Remote Session Server.
• Works in security-constrained environments without a classloader or bytecode generation for most features.
• The interpreter is small, ~400K jar file.
• Pure Java.
• It's Free!!!

• Dynamically evaluate full Java source classes, isolated Java methods, statements, and expressions.

• Optionally typed variables.
• Scripted methods with optionally typed arguments and return values
• Scripted objects (method closures)
• Scripted interfaces and event handlers.
• Convenience syntax for working with JavaBean? Properties, hashtables, and primitive wrapper types.
• Auto-allocation of variables to emulate Java properties files.
• Extensible set of utility and shell-like commands
• Dynamic classpath management, including fine-grained class reloading
• Dynamic command loading and user command path
• Sophisticated namespace and callstack management
• Detailed error reporting

• Interactive Java - try out object features, APIs, and GUI widgets - "hands-on".
• Scripting extension for applications - Allow your applications to be extended via scripts in an intuitive and simple way.
• Macro Languages - Generate scripts as macros and execute them live in your VM easily.
• Education - Teach Java in a hands-on, live environment
• Expression evaluator for scientific, financial apps, and rules engines - evaluate complex expressions with conditions and loops.
• Remote debugging - Embed a live, remotely accessible shell/command line in your application with just a few lines of code.
• Use BeanShell declaratively to replace properties files and replace startup config files with real scripts that perform complex initialization and setup with the full Java syntax at their disposal.

The current development effort focuses on releasing BeanShell 3.0. The following road map serves as a guide to gauge progress to the next release.

• Merge fork BeanShell2
• Support for Java 9/10 with illegal access denied
• Implement varargs
• Implement try with resources
• Implement multi-catch
• Implement interfaces: constants, static, and default methods
• Implement generics parsing
• Implement final modifier
• Implement BigInteger/BigDecimal and number coercion
• Make all current unit tests pass
• Increase unit tests code coverage 70%
• Resolve all outstanding issues and process pull requests
• Apply uniform code style and Javadocs
• Consider feedback from community discussions

Projects that we know of that are using BeanShell. Is your project not listed here? Let us know by submitting an issue.

• Apache Ant
• Apache Camel
• Apache Maven
• Apache OpenOffice
• Apache Taverna
• Apache jMeter
• CA DevTest
• Cisco Prime Network
• ImageJ
• JDE for Emacs
• Joget
• LibreOffice
• LifeRay
• Mentawai
• Micro-Manager
• NetBeans
• OpenJUMP
• OpenKM
• Spring
• TestNG
• jAlbum
• jEdit
• Jupyter Notebooks

On 2015-09-23, the BeanShell repository moved from https://code.google.com/a/apache-extras.org/p/beanshell/ to its new home on https://github.com/beanshell/beanshell/ as Google Code has been discontinued.

The project adopted an open, collaborative approach using GitHub pull requests and has since grown its committer base beyond the original Apache Extra team.

http://beanshell.org/ remains available for older versions.

BeanShell was proposed as an incubator project to move to Apache Software Foundation. In preparation for this, the codebase for BeanShell 2.0b4 was donated to ASF by a code grant, and the license changed to Apache License, version 2.0.

The source code was moved to http://apache-extras.org/ - a project home hosted by Google Code that was only informally associated with Apache Software Foundation. Many BeanShell committers were Apache committers; thus, Apache Extras seemed a natural home.

However, the project did not move into the Apache incubator and remained at apache-extras.org as an independent project.

In March 2015, Google announced it would discontinue Google Code, which provided the hosting for Apache Extras.

The community forked BeanShell in May 2007, creating the BeanShell2 project hosted on google code. The new fork saw crucial fixes and updates with several releases between 2011 and 2014.

The project moved to GitHub in June 2016 after Google Code was discontinued, and it is independently maintained.

In August 2017, BeanShell decided to merge all the changes from the BeanShell2 fork back upstream, ensuring that no effort was lost during this period.

In 2005, JSR 274 was accepted for officially defining the language but was never completed. The current status is dormant, as voted by the JCP in June 2011.

JSR 274: The BeanShell Scripting Language

BeanShell was originally developed by Patrick Niemeyer at http://beanshell.org/ - distributed as BeanShell (2.0b4 and earlier) were distributed under GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and Sun Public License (SPL).

In 2000, the project was hosted on sourceforge, which quickly saw interest in the new Java scripting language grow.