Running specified ant tasks within Maven2 outside the lifecycle

10Mar08

I figured out a best practice to call a specific ant task within maven2 without integrating it into the lifecycle.

This might be necessary if you want to access maven2 classpath variables or properties specified in pom.xml for your ant task. The task will run outside the lifecycle which means that it only runs by explicit invocation. This makes sense for operations like database setup or something similar.

The approach is using maven2 profiles.

Specify a profile in pom.xml:

<profile>
 <id>ant-target</id>
 <build>
  <defaultGoal>antrun:run</defaultGoal>
  <plugins>
   <plugin>
    <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
      
    <configuration>
     <tasks>
      <property name="compile_classpath" refid="maven.compile.classpath"/>
      <property name="runtime_classpath" refid="maven.runtime.classpath"/>
      <property name="test_classpath" refid="maven.test.classpath"/>
      <property name="plugin_classpath" refid="maven.plugin.classpath"/>
      
     <property name="db.username" value="${db.username}"/>
      
   <ant antfile="${basedir}/ant/database-setup.ant.xml" inheritRefs="true" inheritAll="true">
       <target name="${target}" />
      </ant>
     </tasks>
    </configuration>
    
    <goals>
     <goal>run</goal>
    </goals>
   </plugin>
  </plugins>
 </build>
 <dependencies>
  <dependency>
   <groupId>ant-contrib</groupId>
    <artifactId>ant-contrib</artifactId>
    <version>1.0b2</version>
  </dependency>
 </dependencies>
</profile>

You can call the target like that:

mvn -P ant-target -D target=my-ant-target

where -P gives the name of the profile, in my example it is “ant-target”. -D specifies the target variable, in this example maven will try to execute an ant target called “my-ant-target” specified in /ant/database-setup.ant.xml.

Dependencies required by the ant task can be specified in the dependency section. This is really cool because they are only available in context of the ant task.

Notify that sometimes inheritAll=”true” will not work properly (maybe a bug), so you have to specify properties which should be available in your ant task manually (like “db.username” in this example).

Filed under: java, maven2   |  14 Comments