Introduction to Ant

COMP285 Lectures 2022-02-10

Ant Terminology

In Ant, each build file contains one project. A large project may include:

• Smaller sub-projects.
• A master build file that can coordinate the builds of sub-projects.

Each Ant project contains multiple targets that represent stages in the build process. These could be:

• Compiling
• Testing
• Deploying to a Server

Targets can have dependencies so that you can control the order of operations.

Each target is composed of a number of tasks that complete the actual work.

Ant Example

The dependency tree of an Ant project may look something like the following:

flowchart TD
subgraph init
mkdir1[mkdir] --> mkdir2[mkdir]
end
subgraph compile
javac
end
subgraph doc
javadoc
end
subgraph deploy
jar --> ftp
end

init --> compile & doc
compile & doc --> deploy

This tree can be realised in the following XML that should be named build.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="OurProject" default="deploy">
   <target name="init">
      <mkdir dir="build/classes" />
      <mkdir dir="dist" />
   </target>
   <target name="compile" depends="init">
      <javac srcdir="src" destdir="build/classes" includeAntRuntime="no" />
   </target>
   <target name="doc" depends="init">
      <javadoc destdir="build/classes" sourcepath="src" packagenames="org.*" />
   </target>
   <target name="deploy" depends="compile,doc">
      <jar destfile="dist/project.jar" basedir="build/classes" />
      <ftp server="${server.name}" userid="${ftp.username}" password="${ftp.password}">
         <fileset dir="dist" />
      </ftp>
   </target>
</project>

The depends attribute defines the tree.

Property Files

We can include property files with additional parameters like so:

$ ant -propertyfile ftp.properties

These files are structured like so:

server.name=ftp.texas.austin.building7.eblox.org
ftp.username=kingJon
ftp.password=password