I'm recently assigned a task to make ant be able to build war packages for different environments. I'm almost done except one feature.
The ant accepts an env parameter by like -Denv=DEV, and use different configuration files to make the war package. But the default target is start which will build, deploy and start the tomcat. I don't want ant to deploy the war neither start the server when I pass in the -Denv=PROD arg. I only want ant to build the ROOT.war. It's enough.
I know I can just type one more word to achieve this goal, but you know we are all lazy. :D
Does anyone know how to change the default target according to the command line argument?
My requirements are as below:
ant -Denv=DEV will build, deploy, and start the serverant -Denv=PROD will only build the ROOT.war
I suggest that you define targets in your build.xml file called "DEV" and "PROD" and then invoke Ant as:
ant DEV
or
ant PROD
If you want to stick with your current approach of using a system property to select the target, then @krock's answer seems to be the way to go. (But I don't see any advantage in that approach though.)
You could also load different property files based on the env property:
<property file="${env}.properties"/>
and in there configure which target to call:
in DEV.properties:
default.target=dev.build
in PROD.properties:
default.target=prod.build
and then call the target based on the property:
<target name="default">
<antcall target="${default.target}"/>
</target>
<target name="dev.build">
....
</target>
<target name="prod.build">
....
</target>
by specifying separate property files for each build type you will make it easy to configure other aspects of the build.
there is an "if"-Task in the ant-contrib collection. Using this you can
define a default task, that tests for your parameter and calls the required tasks.
You could also define a default behaviour if the dev param is not set.
