I have a big ATG project base that is divided into smaller modules. Now the entire project has an Ant build target and an EAR build target. These smaller modules also have a separate build target. Now I what I want to do is make an Ant script to build these smaller modules in combinations, these combinations can be anything as e.g:
x2x-project---->has a ANT target which will build all a,b,c and a EAR ANT script that will build the EAR all of all module
a-module
b-module
c-module
So now if I want (A+EAR a), (a + b + EAR a + EAR b)?
You might want to take a look at:
http://atgant.sourceforge.net/
I wrote this quite a while back, but it should work as ATG's module system is pretty stable. It only targets the recursive finding of modules, and not any details of the compilation (though an example is included). It has been used on at least one large build.
I no longer maintain this (moved onto something else), but source code is available in http://sourceforge.net/projects/atgant/. YMMV
Related
So I want to have a number of different websites running identical copies of binaries, but with differently transformed config files. These are different regional 'copies' of basically the same website (but connected to different backend DBs etc.)
I have a jenkins job which builds my asp.net site, e.g.;
MSBUILD
C:\Code\ProjectX\src\Website\adminsite.projectx\adminsite.projectx.csproj
/m /p:Configuration=Debug /p:OutputPath=C:\Code\ProjectX\build\Website\adminsite.projectx /t:Rebuild
When that job completes I want it to trigger a transform of the .configs, and a deployment of the binaries. Is there any recommended means of achieving this?
Right now there are only 2 different regional versions of the site deployed, each with their own web.config transformation file
I know that I could have each region BUILD its own copy of binaries, and do a straightforward deployment. But both regions will have identical binaries, so it seems like a waste of time for them to both kick off a build...
If both jobs try to build from the same source location msbuild seems to be producing artefacts in sub-folders of that location - so when both are kicked off at the same time they're tripping over eachother...
Any suggestions? :)
For what it's worth msbuild seems to ignore OutputPath when I provide that
That would have been ideal because I could just use something like;
/p:OutputPath=c:\Code\ProjectX\Build\$(Configuration)\.... etc.
I found that least wasteful way is to build (or "prepackage") once and include the trasforms into the artefact for environment-specific transformations and deployment later. Basically you'll have a custom MSBuild project, on build it'll call PipelinePreDeployCopyAllFilesToOneFolder target (less wasteful than Package since we don't need the final .zip) and redirect it with _PackageTempDir property and include all Web.*.config items, then on deploy you'll call the appropriate transform task and deploy via msdeploy sync.
i have this ant build.xml file with 3 targets in it:
target1, target2 and target3.
If the user simply runs ant and not an explicit ant target1 or something like that, i want to prompt the user asking which target he would like to call.
Remember, the user should only be prompted for this only if he doesnt explicitly call a target while running ant
Ant is not a programming language, it's a dependency matrix language. There's a big difference between the two.
In a program language, you can specify the absolute order of sequence. Plus, you have a lot more flexibility in doing things. In Ant, you don't specify the execution order. You specify various short how to build this steps and then specify their dependencies. Ant automatically will figure out the execution order needed.
It's one of the hardest things for developers to learn about Ant. I've seen too many times when developers try to force execution order and end up executing the same set of targets dozens of times over and over. I recently had a build her that took almost 10 minutes to build, and I rewrote the build.xml to produce the same build in under 2 minutes.
You could use <input/> to get the user input, then use <exec> or <java> to execute another Ant process to execute the requested target. However, this breaks the way Ant is suppose to work.
The default target should be the default target that developers would want to execute on a regular basis while they program. It should not clean the build. It should not run 10 minutes of testing. It should compile any changed files, and rebuild the war or jar. That's what I want about 99% of the time. The whole process takes 10 seconds.
I get really, really pissed when someone doesn't understand this. I hate it when I type ant and I get directions on how to execute my build. I get really irritated when the default target cleans out my previous compiles. And, I get filled with the deadly desire to pummel the person who wrote the damn build file with a large blunt object if I am prompted for something. That's because I will run Ant, do something else while the build happens, then come back to that command window when I think the build is done. Nothing makes me angrier to come back to a build only to find out it's sitting there waiting for me to tell it which target.
If you really, really need to do this. Use a shell script called build.sh. Don't futz with the build.xmlto do this because that affects development.
What you really need to do is teach everyone how to use Ant:
Ant will list user executable targets when you type in ant -p. This will list all targets, and their descriptions. If a target doesn't have a description, it won't list it. This is great for internal targets that a user shouldn't execute on their own. (For example, a target that merely does some sort of test to see if another target should execute). To make this work, make sure your targets have descriptions. I get angry when the person who wrote the Ant file puts a description for some minor target that I don't want, but forgets the description of the target I do want (like compile). Don't make David angry. You don't want to make David angry.
Use default target names for your group. That way, I know what targets do what across the entire project instead of one project using BUILD vs. build-programs vs. Compile vs build-my-stuff vs. StuffBuild. We standardized on Maven lifecycle names names. They're documented and there's no arguments or debates.
Do not use <ant/> or <antcall> to enforce build order. Do not divide your build.xml into a dozen separate build.xml programs. All of these probably break Ant's ability to build a target dependency matrix. Besides, many Ant tools that show dependency hierarchy in a build and they can't work across multiple build files.
Do not wrap your builds inside a shell script. If you do this, you're probably not understanding how builds work.
The build should not update any files in my working directory that were checked out by me. It shouldn't polute my working directory with all sorts of build artifacts spread out all over the place. It shouldn't do anything outside of the working directory (except maybe do some sort of deploy, but only when I run the deploy target). In fact, all build processing should take place in a sub-directory INSIDE my working directory. A clean should merely delete this one directory. Sometimes, this is called build, sometimes dist. I usually call it target because I've adopted Maven naming conventions.
Your build script should be a build script. It shouldn't do checkouts or updates -- at least not automatically. I know that if you use CruiseControl as a continuous build process, you have to have update and checkout functionality inside your build.xml. It's one of the reasons I now use Jenkins.
Sorry about this answer not necessarily being the one you're looking for. You didn't really state what you're doing with Ant. If you're doing builds, don't do what you're trying to do. If you're writing some sort of program, use a real programming language and not Ant.
An Ant build should typically finish in under a minute or two, and redoing a build because you changed a file shouldn't take more than 30 seconds. This is important to understand because I want to encourage my developers to build with Ant, and to use the same targets that my Jenkins server uses. That way, they can test out their build the same way my Jenkins server will do the official build.
you may use the input task provided by ant and make it your default target.
<input
message="Please enter Target ID (1,2 or 3):"
validargs="1,2,3"
addproperty="targetID"
/>
Use the value of this property to decide which target to execute.
From the ant documentation:
message : The Message which gets displayed to the user during the build run.
validargs: Comma separated String containing valid input arguments. If set, input task will reject any input not defined here.
You may pass any arguments according to your needs.
addproperty : The name of a property to be created from input.Behaviour is equal to property task which means that existing
properties cannot be overridden.
I want to be able to have one set of build/props files that will build as many EAR projects as I tell it to.
Each EAR project will have its own set of modules, WARs, JARS, etc.
I'm want to set in a props file what each EAR project consists of, and I want to tell the build each time which EAR(s) to build.
In general, what is a good way to structure the build/props files?
So far, I have one build.xml file and one props file.
In the props file, I have an entry for each EAR project, for example:
Foo=fooWar, foojar
Bar=barWar, barJar1, barJar2
Not sure if that's a good idea or not, and I'm thinking how to tell the build which projects to build.
Since it could be many projects, I'm thinking I would want another props entry like:
projectsToBuild=Foo, Bar
And then before each build, the build person would edit "projectsToBuild".
Is this a good road to go down?
If you're building multiple projects in one hit, then it sounds like you don't have any proper dependency management in place. Have a look at using Apache Ivy to publish and retrieve from a shared repository (e.g. Artifactory), so that you can decouple your project and build them independently.
I'm trying to unify a build process, running one build to get multiple packages. My first shot at this is just having a central build script call <ant> or <subant> on each project's build.xml file. I'm using Ant 1.6, and I've run into a funny problem: either I use the <ant> task, and I can specify multiple targets but not multiple build files, or I use the <subant> task, and I can specify multiple build files but not multiple targets.
I realize there's a few solutions here already:
Just upgrade to Ant 1.7 already; <antcall> can do multiple targets there.
Edit the separate project build files to have a variety of top-level targets, so I can call each individual file with just one target, and use <antcall>.
Copy-paste a lot of <ant> tasks, with a little help from <macrodef> to help the sanity.
Is there something I've missed, that will allow me to do what I want from this single central build.xml without a) editing individual project files, b) writing lots of repetitive code, or c) upgrading Ant, and that d) doesn't require editing every time I add a new project?
For those of you that use Ant with multiple projects, where do you put the build.xml files? Do you put one in each project, or do you put them in a separate project that contains all your Ant-related files?
The usual recommendation is to put a build.xml in each project. But this has a few drawbacks:
It makes it hard to reuse common targets in multiple projects.
Sometimes you want to use Ant to export a project from source control and deploy it. Obviously you can't do this if the build file is in the project itself.
But if you put them all in a common location:
People need to be aware of their location to use them; they can't just use "ant -find" to find the current project's file.
You can't have different build instructions for different branches of the project.
What do you guys do?
EDIT: Thanks for the good suggestions so far. As far Maven, these aren't Java projects, and I get the impression that Maven is only meant for Java.
Place the Ant files with the project. That is the de facto standard and recommended by the creator of Ant. I will try to address some of the issues you have brought up:
Reuse of common targets should be done using techniques as described by Eric Hatcher in his book Java Development with Ant. Basically, you extract all commonality into a some top level files that all other Ant files "inherit" from.
Using Ant to export a project from source control seems odd to me, but if you want to do this, use a different Ant file :-) You can make a target like ant export -Dproject=foo/bar.
For Ant, I recommend you grab that book - it has a ton of helpful techniques.
The real recommendation I would make though is to drop Ant and convert over to Maven - like the Apache Software Foundation did (they maintain both Ant and Maven).
If you're working with independent projects, you can:
put your build.xml at the top level
place common Ant definitions (Antlib) into another project (e.g. config)
use svn:externals to import the common Antlib definition (from 'config') into your project
EDIT The trick with svn:externals is that if you link to the HEAD of some common files, it may happen that they will change after a couple of months/years. So each time you tag, you should change the svn:externals to point to a fix version of the included project. This may come handy when a project has to be rebuild years after it was last built.
My rule of thumb is to put the build.xml file in the directory under which all files are referenced. In other words, no relative paths should start with "../". Where I live, that usually means putting it in the "trunk" directory, which has src, lib, build, docs, etc underneath it.
Doing this makes the paths much cleaner in the file, and it makes it obvious how to build the project.
Where I have multiple projects that need to build, I will create a separate build.xml for each project, and a central build.xml in the directory all the project are in that calls those other build.xml files. That gives you a lot of flexibility with very little work.
I'd expect an Ant build file to be located at the top of a project (it's already a pain to have to look at a the build file to "discover" how to build the project, so if I have to locate it first, it'll drive me totally crazy). Now, regarding all the drawbacks you mentioned, I'm tempted to say: why don't you use Maven?
The way I have done this is in the past (Now I just use Maven):
Have a build.xml in the root of each project
Create an overarching build.xml
for all projects and place it in
the trunk of my repository
The overarching buid.xml has
checkout tasks for each project.
I am guessing when you mentioned
export from repository, you
actually meant import.
The overarching build file also
defines the dependencies, if any
You may update individual projects using each project's individual build file
If you do have common tasks defined, you may inherit from a common build file as well as someone else suggested.
Looks like your set of projects might be a good candidate for migration to Maven, I realize it is not always possible but if you have time, you might want to look into it.