HBase + Subversion + Eclipse + Windows (it should be easy to adapt for Linux) Update : please note that since HBase-4336 / HBase 0.96 the source tree is split in more than one Maven module this post is no more relevant, i have created a new post on this subject : http://michaelmorello.blogspot.fr/2012/06/hbase-096-eclipse-maven.html This is a simple setup in order to play with the source code of HBase under Microsoft Windows. Since HBase use some Unix specific commands like chmod the only requirements here are Cygwin and a working Maven 3 environment. (It is obvious that you need Java and Eclipse , but you DON'T need anything else like the Eclipse Maven plugin or any SSH configuration) 1. Checkout the source code The first step is to check out the source code from the Subversion repository. I did it under my cygwin home repository. In this example i want to play with the 0.90 branch : svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/hbase/branches/0.90/ hbase-0.90