How to get a list of build targets in Ant

ant

My codebase has a long build.properties file written by someone else. I want to see the available built targets without having to search through the file manually. Does ant have a command for this – something like ant show-targets – that will make it list all the targets in the build file?

Best Answer

The -p or -projecthelp option does exactly this, so you can just try:

ant -p build.xml

From ant's command line documentation:

The -projecthelp option prints out a list of the build file's targets. Targets that include a description attribute are listed as "Main targets", those without a description are listed as "Other targets", then the "Default" target is listed ("Other targets" are only displayed if there are no main targets, or if Ant is invoked in -verbose or -debug mode).

Related Solutions

How to wrap an Ant build with Maven

You can use the maven-antrun-plugin to invoke the ant build. Then use the build-helper-maven-plugin to attach the jar produced by ant to the project. The attached artifact will be installed/deployed alongside the pom.
If you specify your project with packaging pom, Maven will not conflict with the ant build.

In the example below, the ant build.xml is assumed to be in src/main/ant, have a compile goal, and output to ant-output.jar.

<plugin>
  <artifactId>maven-antrun-plugin</artifactId>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <phase>process-resources</phase>
      <configuration>
        <tasks>
          <ant antfile="src/main/ant/build.xml" target="compile"/>
        </tasks>
      </configuration>
      <goals>
        <goal>run</goal>
      </goals>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>
<plugin>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
  <artifactId>build-helper-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.3</version>
  <executions>
    <execution>
      <id>add-jar</id>
      <phase>package</phase>
      <goals>
        <goal>attach-artifact</goal>
      </goals>
      <configuration>
        <artifacts>
          <artifact>
            <file>${project.build.directory}/ant-output.jar</file>
            <type>jar</type>
          </artifact>
        </artifacts>
      </configuration>
    </execution>
  </executions>
</plugin>

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How to wrap an Ant build with Maven

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