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1. The installation directory, referred to as [dspace]. This is the location where DSpace is installed and running off of it is the location that gets defined in the dspace.cfg as "dspace.dir". It is where all the DSpace configuration files, command line scripts, documentation and webapps will be installed to.
2. The source directory, referred to as [dspace-source] . This is the location where the DSpace release distribution has been unzipped into. It usually has the name of the archive that you expanded such as dspace-<version>-release or dspace-<version>-src-release. Normally it is the directory where all of your "build" commands will be run. 
3. The web deployment directory. This is the directory that contains your DSpace web application(s). In DSpace 1.5.x and above, this corresponds to [dspace]/webapps by default. However, if you are using Tomcat, you may decide to copy your DSpace web applications from [dspace]/webapps/ to [tomcat]/webapps/ (with [tomcat] being wherever you installed Tomcat‚ also known as $CATALINA_HOME).
   For details on the contents of these separate directory trees, refer to directories.html. Note that the[dspace-source]and[dspace]directories are always separate!

If you ever notice that many files seems to have duplicates under [dspace-source]/dspace/target do not care about it. This directory will be used by Maven for the build process and you should not change any file in it unless you know exactly what you are doing.

Installation

This method gets you up and running with DSpace quickly and easily. It is identical in both the Default Release and Source Release distributions.

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