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Venue Quick Start

Running a Venue​

You can use the Covia grid simply through the online web app or the SDK as a user. But for more powerful capabilities, such as controlling local resources and installing custom adapters, you may want to create your own venue.

A venue is implemented as a server process that you can run by obtaining the latest covia.jar which is regularly made available in the Snapshots Drive

Running a venue requires Java 21+ installed. The venue can be launched with:

java -jar covia.jar

This will launch a local venue with a default configuration, suitable for testing and development. You can connect to it with the Covia web app at http://localhost:8080.

Each venue also includes a web presence for diagnostics and discovery of server capabilities. This will appear at http://localhost:8080 (The same URL you can use to connect in the Covia App). For an example of this web site, see the Test Venue

Building the venue server​

The venue server is a Maven project in Java.

You can build it with Maven 3.5+ using the following command in a clone of the Covia repo root directory:

mvn clean install

This will build the project, including the full Venue .jar at venue/target/covia.jar

Configuring the Venue​

A venue can be configured with a JSON / JSON5 config file to enable or disable features, add adapaters and more. To set a configuration file for your venue either:

  • Place it in the user's home directory at ~/.covia/config.json
  • Start covia.jar with an explicit configuration like java -jar covia.jar my-config.json

An example configuration file is available as a documented template.